PDF to Text
Pull the text out of a PDF and copy it or save it as a .txt file. Runs entirely in your browser — the file is never uploaded.
Drop a PDF to extract its text
or click to choose a file
- 100% in your browser
- No upload, no signup
- No page or size limit
- Files never leave your device
If your PDF is a scan, there is no text inside it to extract. We check every page and tell you before you download anything.
Why people pull the text out of a PDF
A PDF is a description of a printed page. It knows where every character sits, what size it is and which font draws it — but it does not know that those characters form a sentence, a heading or a paragraph. That is fine when you want to read the page, and a problem the moment you want to do anything else with what it says.
So people reach for plain text. Someone with a long report wants to search it properly, or jump between its sections instead of scrolling through ninety pages. Someone is quoting a paragraph into an email and does not want the font, the line breaks and the invisible formatting to come with it. Someone is pasting a document into an AI assistant, which wants words and not page furniture. Someone is archiving a contract in a format that will still open in twenty years without any particular software.
There is also the accessibility case, and it is more common than it looks. Multi-column layouts are hard to read on a phone, and a screen reader following the wrong order reads a two-column page as nonsense. Stripping a document down to its words in the right order makes it usable in ways the original layout prevents.
Two kinds of PDF, and only one of them has text
Extracting text from a PDF means reading the characters stored inside the file. That works when the PDF has a text layer — the actual letters, kept alongside the instructions that draw them. A scanned PDF has no text layer: it is a picture of a page, and there are no characters in it at all.
Most PDFs made by software — exported from a word processor, printed to PDF from a browser, generated by an invoicing system — carry a text layer. You can tell by opening the file and trying to select a sentence with your cursor. If a highlight follows the words, the characters are really there and any tool can read them.
A PDF made by a scanner or a phone camera is different. Each page is one image. The words are visible to you because your eyes do the recognising, but as far as the file is concerned the page contains a photograph and nothing else. Selecting text does nothing, searching finds nothing, and extraction returns nothing — not because the tool failed, but because there is nothing there to return.
Turning a picture of words back into words is a separate job called OCR, and it is a recognition problem rather than a reading problem: software guesses at each shape and is sometimes wrong. We do not do it here. What we do instead is check every page and say which category it falls into, before you download anything. A tool that hands you an empty file, or that quietly switches to OCR without telling you, has left you unable to tell which kind of document you had.
The check is not a guess. A page with a text layer reports its characters; a page without one reports nothing at all. There is no middle ground to get wrong, which is why the result appears above the text rather than buried in a warning somewhere.
How to extract text from a PDF
Nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded. Drop the file in, look at what we found, then take the text however you need it.
Drop your PDF in
Choose a file or drag it onto the box. It is read by your own browser — it is not sent anywhere, and there is no page or size limit beyond what your device can hold.
Read the summary first
Before any text appears you are told how many pages carry a text layer, which pages are scans, whether the document has filled form fields, and whether a two-column layout was found and reordered.
Adjust the reading if you need to
By default the text follows the page as you see it and loose lines are joined back into paragraphs. Both can be switched: document order preserves the sequence the PDF stores internally, and keeping every line as-is preserves the original line breaks.
Copy it or save it
Copy puts the text straight on your clipboard, which is what most people want when they are pasting into a document or an AI assistant. Download writes a UTF-8 .txt file with the same content.
Related: If you only need the text from a few pages, it is quicker to extract those pages first.
What this PDF to text converter does differently
The naive way to extract text is to take the list of pieces the PDF hands over and join them together. It is one line of code and it produces something that looks almost right — which is why so many tools do it. On a two-page tax form that approach glues words together across seventy-six line breaks. On eight pages of a research paper, two hundred and ninety-three. You get "permission toreproduce" and "neural networksin particular", scattered through the document where you will not necessarily spot them before you use the text.
The deeper problem is order. A PDF stores text in the order it is painted onto the page, which is not the order you read it in. On a form, a date field can come out as "MM DD YYYY/ /" because the separators are drawn last. On a two-column page the two columns interleave, one line each, which is exactly what happens when you select a whole page in a PDF reader and paste it somewhere. We rebuild the reading order from where the characters actually sit, which gives back "MM / DD / YYYY" and keeps each column whole.
Then there are the things that are easy to miss entirely. If you have filled in a PDF form, none of your answers are in the page text — they live on the form fields, and an extractor that only reads the page hands you a blank template while looking like it worked. We collect them and add them at the end. And some PDF generators emit characters that look right but are not: a Chinese document can come out full of Kangxi radicals, indistinguishable on screen, invisible to a search, wrong when pasted. Every string we hand over is normalised so those fold back to the characters they are drawn as.
What people use it for:
- Searching a long report properly, or jumping between its sections
- Pasting a document into an AI assistant without the page furniture
- Quoting from a paper without dragging the formatting along
- Getting the answers back out of a form somebody filled in and returned
- Archiving a document as plain text that will open anywhere, forever
- Reading a multi-column layout on a phone, in one readable column
Works wherever you already are
The work happens inside your browser, so there is nothing to install and no account to make. Any current browser on any operating system will do.
Windows
Chrome, Edge or Firefox. No reader, no Acrobat subscription, nothing to download.
macOS
Safari, Chrome or Firefox. Faster than opening the file in Preview and selecting page by page.
Linux
Any modern browser. The same result as the pdftotext command line, without leaving the page.
iPhone and iPad
Safari or Chrome. Useful when a PDF arrives by email and you need the text in a message.
Android
Chrome, Firefox or Samsung Internet. Handy for reading a two-column document in one column.
Chromebook
Works fully offline once the page has loaded, which suits a managed school device.
Why copying text out of a PDF usually comes out wrong
If you have ever selected a page in a PDF reader, pasted it, and found the sentences shuffled, this is why — and it is the same reason most conversion tools produce the same mess.
What the PDF stores
The order the page is painted in. Text goes down in whatever sequence suited whatever produced the file: a heading, then a footer, then the body, then the separators that fall between the fields. Copying follows that sequence, so on a two-column page you get one line of the left column, one line of the right, all the way down.
What we rebuild
The order you would read in. Characters are grouped into lines by where they sit, lines are grouped into columns, and the columns are read one after the other. Line breaks come back, columns stay whole, and separators return to the middle of the fields they belong to.
Where this still has limits
A picture of a page cannot be read at all, and a table stops being a table once it is plain text — rows survive, the grid does not. A line that spans both columns without any part crossing the gutter, like a row of author names, is indistinguishable from one line of each column, so a title block can come out in an odd order. Adobe's own community says the same thing about Acrobat: with sidebars and inset copy, it is "almost impossible" to know which line to follow. When our reading looks wrong, switch to document order and compare.
Text or Word?
Plain text is the right answer when you want the words and nothing else — searching, quoting, pasting into an assistant, archiving. It is the wrong answer when you need the document back as a document, with its headings, tables and images intact; that is a job for a PDF to Word conversion, and no .txt file will do it. It is worth knowing which one you came here for before you judge the result.
Your document stays on your device
The files people bring to a tool like this are rarely trivial. They are contracts, invoices, CVs, medical letters, filled-in application forms — documents whose whole content is the sensitive part. That is worth thinking about before uploading one to anywhere.
This tool does not upload anything. Your browser opens the PDF, reads it and assembles the text on your own machine. There is no request carrying your file, no queue on a server, nothing cached anywhere, and no copy for anyone to delete later. Close the tab and it is gone.
It also means the usual limits do not apply. There is no page cap, no file-size cap and no daily quota, because there is no server bill behind any of it — only what your own device can comfortably hold.
No upload
The PDF is read where it already is. It never travels.
No account
No sign-up, no email, no watermark on the result.
Nothing kept
There is no copy on our side to store, log or delete.
Questions about extracting text from PDFs
Why is my extracted text empty?⌄
What is a text layer?⌄
Do you run OCR on scanned PDFs?⌄
Why does copy-paste from a PDF come out jumbled?⌄
Why is the order still wrong in my two-column document?⌄
I filled in a PDF form — why is my text missing?⌄
Will tables keep their layout?⌄
Should I convert to text or to Word?⌄
Are my files uploaded?⌄
Is there a file size limit?⌄
Does it work with Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Arabic PDFs?⌄
What encoding is the .txt file?⌄
Get the text out of your PDF
Free, unlimited, and processed entirely in your browser — with an honest answer about what is actually in your file.
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