Completely FREE text extractor and word counter for PDFs and Word documents. No upload, no signup. Drop in a PDF, a .docx, or a plain text file and get its text back clean and copyable — along with instant word, character, sentence, reading-time, and speaking-time counts.
Everything is parsed inside your browser. Manuscripts, contracts, and papers are never uploaded, so the confidential draft stays confidential.
Your data never reaches us
Nifty Utilities has no backend server, database, user accounts, or endpoint capable of receiving your tool inputs. Files and entries are processed inside your browser. We cannot view, capture, or store them.
Two jobs, one tool
Sometimes you need the text itself — to quote a passage, feed a document into another program, rebuild a file whose source is lost, or de-format a mess into clean plain text. Sometimes you only need the numbers: how many words is this PDF, does the essay fit the limit, how long will this speech run. Both jobs start with the same step, extracting the text layer, so this tool does both at once: the full text in a copyable box, the statistics right above it.
Word counts for files that hide them
Word processors show a live word count, but the moment a document becomes a PDF the count disappears — and plenty of things arrive only as PDFs: submission drafts, contracts, transcripts, other people's manuscripts. Word limits, meanwhile, are everywhere: college essays, grant applications, abstracts, competition entries. Extract the file here and the count is immediate. The reading-time estimate uses a typical adult silent-reading pace (about 240 words per minute) and the speaking-time estimate uses a comfortable presentation pace (about 130), which is the number you want when a slot is "ten minutes" and your script is a page count.
What extraction does to formatting
Extraction pulls the words and lets the layout go. Headings survive as lines of text, but columns are read in sequence, tables flatten into rows of words, and headers, footers, and page numbers appear wherever they sat in the file. For a novel or a report this matters little; for a dense two-column academic paper, expect to see the text in reading order that occasionally surprises. PDFs are the trickier case because the format stores positioned fragments rather than flowing paragraphs — this tool reassembles them line by line, which produces clean results for the vast majority of documents.
The scanned-PDF trap
A PDF made by scanning or photographing paper looks like text but contains none — each page is just a picture. Extraction will correctly report that there is nothing to extract. The fix is optical character recognition, which reads the pixels: the Screenshot Table Extractor on this site runs OCR entirely in your browser and handles exactly that case. A quick way to tell which kind of PDF you have: try selecting text in your PDF viewer. If you cannot select anything, it is a scan.
Word documents and plain text
Modern Word files (.docx) extract cleanly, including list items and footnote text, via an open-source parser that runs locally. The older binary .doc format is not supported — open it in Word or a free office suite and save as .docx first. Plain .txt files are accepted too, which turns the tool into a straightforward word counter for anything you can paste into a file.
Why no-upload matters here
The documents people most often need counted or extracted are unpublished manuscripts, legal drafts, and application essays — precisely the things that should not be pasted into a random website that stores what it receives. This page's parsers (Mozilla's pdf.js for PDFs, mammoth for .docx) are downloaded to your browser and run on your machine. The text panel below the statistics is generated locally and vanishes when you close the tab.
Frequently asked questions
How do I check the word count of a PDF?
Choose the PDF and click extract. The word count appears instantly above the text, alongside characters with and without spaces, an approximate sentence count, and reading and speaking times.
Why did my PDF extract as empty or gibberish?
Empty means a scanned PDF with no text layer — run OCR instead. Gibberish (boxes, wrong characters) means the PDF uses non-standard font encoding, which some generators produce; try copying from a PDF viewer to confirm, and fall back to OCR if the viewer shows the same problem.
Can I turn the extracted text into a new document?
Yes — copy it straight into any editor, or download it as a .txt file. If you want it as structured HTML or Markdown for the web, paste it through the Markdown to HTML Converter after marking it up.
Important
This tool reads the text layer inside a file. Scanned PDFs are photographs of pages and contain no text layer — they need OCR, not extraction. Extracted text loses formatting such as columns, tables, and footnote placement, so verify anything you quote against the original.
Support
Problem with this tool or suggestions for improvement? Please email support@niftyutilities.com.