Export PDFs as text

If you have a PDF version of a document, but you don’t have the original application file, you can export the text to Rich Text Format (RTF), a standard for exchanging content between text-editing applications, or Microsoft Word format. Images in the PDF are saved by default in JPEG format. The text file you obtain when you export a PDF to RTF or Word format is not equivalent to the source file in the authoring application. Some coding information may be lost in the conversion.

You can also export a PDF to plain text or accessible text. Accessible text follows the reading order preference selected in the Reading preferences, and includes comments and form fields in its output. Accessible text also includes some formatting, such as line breaks. Any alternate text in the document tags is used in place of images and figures. Plain text follows the structure order of text in the document and ignores all artifacts and figure elements in the conversion. Hard hyphens are preserved, and soft hyphens are removed.

  1. Do one of the following:

    • Click the Export button in the Tasks toolbar, and choose Word Document.

    • Choose File > Save As, and then choose a text format: Microsoft Word Document (*.doc); Rich Text Format (*.rtf); Text (Accessible) (*.txt); or Text (Plain) (*.txt).

  2. Click Settings, select the options you want, click OK, and click Save.

Word and RTF options

(For a list of plain text options, see the options for HTML and XML.)

Include Comments

Preserves PDF comments.



Include Images

Includes images in the final output. The default image format is JPEG.



Output Format

Specifies the image format. Select JPEG or PNG, and then select the color space and resolution options.



Use Colorspace

Specifies the color space. You can choose Color or Grayscale, or let the color space be determined automatically.



Change Resolution

Downsamples images. If you do not select this option, images are created at the same resolution as in the PDF.



Downsample To
Specifies the resolution for downsampling images. Images are never upsampled.
You can export multiple PDFs to RTF using the Advanced > Document Processing > Batch Processing command.