Why did my PDF come out empty?

Because there was nothing in it to extract. A scanned or photographed document holds an image of a page, not the characters on it — the words you can see are pixels. Docqify tells you when that is the case instead of handing back a blank file, and can read those pages with optical character recognition, which works out the letters from their shapes.

Is the OCR done on my device?

Yes. The recognition engine is a few megabytes of WebAssembly served from this site and run in your browser, the same one the image converter uses. Nothing is uploaded, which matters more here than almost anywhere else: the documents people need to read this way are usually the ones they least want to send to a stranger.

How accurate is reading a scan?

On a clean, straight scan of ordinary printed text, very. On a photograph taken at an angle, on faint print, or on handwriting, much less so — and it will be confidently wrong rather than obviously wrong, which is worth remembering before pasting the result anywhere that matters. Text that was already text in the document is never guessed at; it comes out exactly as written.

Does the layout survive?

The line structure does; the arrangement does not. Plain text has no columns, tables or positions, so a two-column page comes out as its lines in the order the document stores them, which is not always the order you read them in. That is a property of plain text rather than of this tool, and it is why nothing here tries to rewrite what it found.

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PDF to textincluding the scanned ones

Get the words out, even from a scan. Your file never leaves this device.

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Pull the words out of a PDF, including scanned ones. It is opened on this device and never uploaded.

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The document that has no text in it

Two very different files answer to the name PDF. One was made by a word processor and carries its text as text, so getting it out is exact and instant. The other is a photograph of paper — it contains no text at all, only an image that looks like it. Most tools run the same extraction over both and hand back an empty file for the second, which reads as a broken tool rather than the honest answer it is. Docqify counts the pages that have no text, says so, and offers to read them by eye instead.

Text that is really text comes out exactly as it was written, with the line structure the document had.
Pages that are pictures are found and named. Reading them is a second, slower pass you choose to run, because it takes a second or two per page and most documents never need it.
The recogniser runs on your device — the same engine the image converter uses, served from this site. A scanned bank statement is read where it already is.
Everything runs on your device. The page ships a Content Security Policy that blocks connections to any other origin, so a document you read here cannot be sent anywhere.

Questions

PDF to text — the details

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The same guarantee applies to every one of these: the file is opened by your browser, worked on there, and never sent anywhere.