PDF to Text

Convert your PDF files to Text, right here in your browser.

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Frequently asked questions

What is actually inside a Text file?

A .txt file is characters and line breaks and nothing else: no styling, no structure, no metadata to lose.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. Your PDF is read and the Text file is built entirely inside your browser, so nothing ever leaves your device.

Can I convert several files at once?

Yes. Add as many PDF files as you like and download the results one by one, or all together as a ZIP archive.

Will the result look exactly like the original PDF?

The text, headings and table columns are recovered and rebuilt as a Text file. This is a content-faithful conversion rather than a copy of the original page design, so fonts, spacing and images are not carried over.

What happens with a scanned PDF?

A scanned page is a picture of text rather than text itself, so there is nothing to extract from it. Convert it to an image format instead, or run it through OCR first.

Is there a file size or file count limit?

No. Everything runs on your own device, so the only practical limit is how much memory your browser has available.

Do I need to install anything?

No. There is nothing to install and no account to create — the converter runs in any modern browser, on desktop and mobile alike.

Why is the text in a strange order?

Almost certainly a multi-column layout. Reading order is rebuilt from geometry — down the page, then across — which handles ordinary documents correctly but cannot tell a two-column page from a wide table without understanding the layout. Academic papers in two columns interleave as a result. It is a genuine limit of geometric reconstruction rather than a bug.

My text file is empty.

The PDF is a scan: its pages are images, and the words are pixels rather than text. There is nothing in the file to extract. Try selecting a sentence in a PDF viewer — if nothing highlights, you need OCR before any extraction tool can help.

Are page breaks marked?

By a blank line between pages, which keeps the boundaries visible without introducing markers that a script would then have to strip out. Nothing else is added — the file is your document's text and no more.

Do accented characters and other scripts survive?

Yes. The output is UTF-8, so accents, currency symbols, Cyrillic, Greek, CJK and everything else come through as themselves rather than as replacement characters.

Is the formatting really all gone?

Entirely — that is what makes it a text file. No bold, no headings, no fonts, no tables. If you want the heading structure kept, PDF to Word and PDF to HTML both preserve two levels of it while still giving you editable content.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. It is read and the text extracted inside your browser tab, so a confidential document can be turned into text without being transmitted anywhere.

Sometimes the formatting is the obstacle. You want the words out of a PDF so you can grep them, diff them, paste them into an email, feed them to a script, or check a word count — and every layer of styling between you and the text is in the way.

This is the conversion that removes all of it. The result is a .txt file: the document's text, in reading order, with pages separated by a blank line and nothing else added.

Getting there still requires the same reconstruction every PDF conversion needs, because a PDF has no lines of text in it — only glyphs at coordinates. Runs sharing a baseline are grouped back into lines, and lines are ordered down the page and then left to right, which is what produces text that reads in the order a person would read it rather than in the order the file happens to store it.

How to extract text from a PDF

Add your PDF
Drop it in or choose it. Nothing is uploaded — the extraction happens in your browser.
Convert
Every page's text runs are read with their positions, grouped into lines by baseline, and written out in reading order with a blank line between pages.
Download the .txt
Plain UTF-8 text, ready for a text editor, a terminal, a spreadsheet import or anything else that wants words rather than a document.

Reading order, which is the whole difficulty

A PDF's content stream is not obliged to store text in the order anyone reads it. Text is drawn in whatever sequence the generating program emitted it, which for a two-column layout may be the entire left column followed by the entire right one, or may alternate between them, or may be neither.

So the order has to be rebuilt from the geometry: down the page first, then across. Runs that share a baseline — within a tolerance that scales with the type size, so a superscript or a footnote marker stays attached to its line rather than starting a new one — become a single line.

This gets ordinary documents right. It does not solve multi-column layouts, where the correct reading order depends on understanding that there are two columns, and no purely geometric rule distinguishes a two-column page from a wide table. An academic paper in two columns will interleave, and that is a known limit rather than an oversight.

What you get

The text, in reading order: All of it, with lines reconstructed from glyph positions.
Page separation: A blank line between pages, so page boundaries remain visible without any markup being introduced.
UTF-8 encoding: So accented characters, currency symbols and non-Latin scripts survive intact.
No formatting at all: The point of the format. No bold, no headings, no fonts, no tables — if you want structure preserved, PDF to Word or PDF to HTML keep the heading levels.
No images: A text file cannot hold them. Extract PDF images pulls them out separately at full resolution.

What this is useful for

Searching and counting: once text is in a .txt, grep, word counts and diffs all work. Comparing two revisions of a contract by converting both and diffing them is far quicker than reading them side by side.

Feeding other tools: scripts, text analysis, translation software and language models all want plain text, and most handle it better than they handle PDF.

Accessibility and reuse: a plain text file can be read by anything, at any size, by any screen reader, with none of a PDF's layout getting in the way.

Quoting: pulling a paragraph out of a report to paste into an email, without dragging the source's fonts and spacing along with it.

The one thing that produces an empty file

A scanned PDF has no text layer. Its pages are photographs, and the letters you see are pixels — so there is nothing to extract and the output is empty. That is an accurate report rather than a fault.

Check by opening the PDF and trying to select a sentence. Text that highlights will be extracted; a selection rectangle over an image means the document needs OCR, which recognises letter shapes rather than reading letters that are already recorded, and is a different operation altogether.

About the Text format

.txt is the plain-text format ASA/ANSI introduced in 1963. It is published as an open specification under the name US-ASCII / UTF-8, so a file can be read without the program that wrote it.

A .txt file is characters and line breaks and nothing else: no styling, no structure, no metadata to lose.

Files like this usually come out of Notepad, TextEdit, and nano.

What comes through

body text
reading order
page breaks

What does not

heading levels
embedded images
table rows and columns
the exact page design

Worth knowing

A scanned PDF is a picture of a page, not text, so there is nothing for this tool to extract — the result will be empty. That is the honest outcome, not a failure.
Plain text carries no styling at all, so the output uses one readable typeface throughout and takes its structure from blank lines.

Information