Get Text From a PDF on iPhone: the Shortcuts Action
By Taha Baalla··5 min read
Extract text from a PDF with the Shortcuts app
Selecting by hand works for a paragraph. For a whole document, the Shortcuts app does it in one tap.
- Open Shortcuts and tap + to create a new shortcut.
- Tap the search field, type PDF, and pick Get Text from PDF — it sits under Documents.
- Tap Document inside the action, choose Shortcut Input, and set the shortcut to accept PDFs from the share sheet.
- Add Copy to Clipboard underneath it, or Quick Look if you would rather read the result first.
Run it from the share sheet in Files, Mail or Safari, and the whole document's text comes back without a single drag handle.
Which Shortcuts action to use, and what it returns
Get Text from PDF is the one you want. Three of its options decide what you actually get:
- Rich Text keeps inline links and basic formatting instead of flattening everything to plain text.
- Combine Pages returns one block of text. Turn it off and you get a list, one item per page, which is what you want if the next action loops over pages.
- Header and Footer text lets you name the running header so it is stripped out rather than repeated on every page.
It is a text extractor, not an OCR engine. If the PDF has no text layer, it returns nothing at all — which is the next section.
Extract text from a scanned PDF that has no text layer
A PDF made by a scanner or a photo is an image wrapped in a PDF. There is no text inside it to get, so Get Text from PDF comes back empty and it looks like the shortcut is broken.
The fix is to treat it as an image:
- On the page: open the PDF, press and hold on the words. iOS 16 and later run Live Text over the image and give you normal selection handles.
- In a shortcut: convert the PDF to images first, then run Extract Text from Image over them.
If a shortcut that worked yesterday returns nothing today, this is almost always why: the document changed, not the shortcut.
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Where Nemos fits
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