PDF to Text
Pull the text content out of a PDF in seconds. Your file never leaves your device.
How it works
This tool reads the text layer already embedded in your PDF — the same text you could select with your cursor — and lays it out as plain text you can copy or download. It relies on Mozilla's PDF.js library running directly in your browser tab, so the document never leaves your device.
What you get
The output is plain .txt: one block of text per page, with page breaks marking where each page ended. Formatting, fonts, columns and colors are deliberately stripped away — what remains is the pure content. That makes it ideal for feeding text into other tools: a translation service, a notes app, a search index, or an AI assistant that needs your document's content as input.
What people use it for
Quoting and citing. Pull an exact paragraph out of a report or academic paper without retyping it and risking a transcription error.
Search and analysis. Paste the text into a document search, a spreadsheet, or a word-frequency counter to analyze a contract or study material.
Accessibility. Plain text works with screen readers and text-to-speech tools far more reliably than a PDF viewer does.
Content reuse. Recover your own writing from an old PDF — a newsletter, a thesis chapter — so you can republish it elsewhere.
What about scanned PDFs?
If your PDF is a scan (a photo or image saved as PDF, with no selectable text), this tool won't find anything to extract, because there's no text layer to read. In that case, use our Image to Text (OCR) tool instead, which reads text visually from an image.
Tips
For long documents, downloading the .txt file is more practical than copying from the box, since some browsers struggle with very large text selections. If the extraction looks garbled, the PDF probably uses an unusual font encoding or is actually a scan in disguise — the OCR tool is the right fallback there too.
Frequently asked questions
Does formatting get preserved?
No — the output is plain text. Layout, columns and styling are not carried over, only the words themselves and page breaks.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Not currently — you'll need to remove the password protection first using your PDF reader.
Is there a page limit?
No fixed limit, but very long PDFs will simply take a bit longer since processing happens on your own device.
How is this different from PDF to Word?
PDF to Word produces an editable document with paragraph structure, meant for further editing in a word processor. This tool produces raw .txt, meant for copying, searching or processing by other software.
Does the order of the text match the page?
Generally yes — text comes out in reading order — but complex multi-column layouts can interleave columns. Check the output when precision matters.
Can I extract text from several PDFs at once?
No — the tool processes one PDF at a time. After you extract a file, use the "remove" button to clear it and drop in the next one.