Pull the words out of a PDF as plain text you can copy, edit, or save. Drop a PDF and get its text — all in your browser, nothing uploaded.
What works & what doesn't: this pulls out the real text layer of a PDF — the actual characters, not a picture of them — entirely in your browser, with nothing uploaded. It works great on PDFs created digitally (from Word, a browser, export tools, and so on). It can't read scanned PDFs, which are really just images of pages with no text inside; for those you'd need OCR, which is a different kind of tool. If a PDF comes back empty, it's almost certainly scanned.