PDF to Text Converter
Extract the text that is already inside a PDF and get it back as plain text you can copy, search or save as a .txt file. The document is read in your browser, so it is never uploaded.
Your files are processed locally in your browser tab. They are not uploaded to this server and they are not sent to any third party.
- File
- Size and pages
Text extraction starts by itself as soon as your file is loaded. The bar stays visible until the text is on screen; "Extract text" runs it again if you need to.
Extracted text
How to extract text from a PDF
- Choose a PDF file, or drop it onto the box above. Extraction starts automatically.
- Wait while each page is read. The bar stays on screen until the text appears, and shows the page being processed.
- Read the extracted text, or press "Copy text" to put all of it on the clipboard.
- Press "Download TXT" to save the text as a plain .txt file.
- Press "Convert another file" to start again with a different document.
What is a PDF to Text converter?
A PDF to Text converter reads the characters stored inside a PDF and writes them out as plain text, so the words can be pasted into an editor, searched, translated or fed into another program. It is useful when a document is locked into a format you cannot edit: an invoice, a contract, a report, a manual or a form someone sent you.
How to extract text from a PDF
Choose the file with the selector above, or drag it onto the box. The tool reads one page at a time and shows which page it is working on, then displays everything it found in the text area. No settings are required, because the only thing to decide is what to do with the result.
How to download text from a PDF
Copy text puts the whole document on your clipboard, ready to paste into
Word, Google Docs, a spreadsheet, a notes app or a chat window.
Download TXT saves the same content as a plain .txt file
named after your original document, encoded as UTF-8 so non-English characters stay
intact. The optional page markers help when you need to cite or locate a passage.
Why some PDFs have no extractable text
This is the limitation worth understanding before you use any tool like this one. A PDF has two very different ways of showing a page, and only one of them contains text.
| Type of PDF | What is inside | Can this tool extract it? |
|---|---|---|
| Exported from software (Word, Docs, InDesign, LaTeX) | Character codes plus the fonts used to draw them | Yes. This is the normal case. |
| Scanned from paper, or photographed | An image of each page | No. OCR would be needed to recognise the letters. |
| Printed to PDF from a viewer that rasterised the page | An image, even though the original had text | No, for the same reason. |
| Text saved as vector outlines or curves | Drawing instructions with no characters | No. The letters are shapes, not text. |
| Password protected | Encrypted content | No. The tool says so and stops. |
When nothing can be extracted, this tool says so plainly. It does not return an empty file, and it does not claim that a picture has been recognised as text.
Does this tool upload my PDF?
No. Your file is read with the browser's File API and passed to the PDF engine running on this page. There is no upload request, no temporary copy on the server and no conversion queue, because there is no server-side conversion at all. The same is true of the text: it exists only in the text area on this page until you copy or save it. This is why the tool works as fast as it does, and why it can handle documents you would rather not send to a stranger.
Related PDF tools
If the text is what you need but the format is not, these work the same way and keep the file on your device: convert PDF pages to JPG images, merge several PDFs into one, split a long PDF into smaller files, extract only the pages you need, or compress a PDF that is too large to email. For a document with no text layer at all, converting it to images is the step before running OCR elsewhere.
What this tool does not do
- It does not perform OCR, so a scanned or photographed PDF yields no text.
- It does not reproduce tables, columns or multi-column magazine layout as structure; the text is returned as a linear stream.
- It does not preserve bold, italic, font sizes, colours, links or images, because plain text has none of those.
- It does not extract text from an embedded image inside an otherwise textual PDF.
- It does not open password-protected PDFs, and does not attempt to guess passwords.
- It cannot recover text from a PDF that only stores the letters as vector outlines.
Frequently asked questions
Does this tool upload my PDF?
No. The file is read by your browser and handed to the PDF engine running on this page. It is never sent to our server, and no copy of it or of the extracted text is stored anywhere. You can confirm this by watching the network tab of your browser while you use the tool: no file data leaves the page.
Why does a scanned PDF produce no text?
A scanned PDF is a photograph of each page. It contains no character data at all, only pixels, so there is nothing for this tool to read. Recovering text from a scan requires OCR (optical character recognition), which is a different technology and is not part of this tool. The page will tell you when this happens instead of returning an empty file.
Which PDFs can be converted?
Any PDF that already contains a text layer: documents exported from Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice, InDesign, LaTeX, most invoices and most e-books. In practice that is anything that was generated by software rather than scanned from paper.
Is the formatting preserved?
The words, reading order, line breaks and paragraph breaks are kept. Columns, tables, sidebars, headers and footers are flattened into a single stream, so a table may come out as one column or as rows that are hard to line up. A PDF does not store tables as tables, so any tool that claims perfect table extraction is reading the layout and guessing.
Are non-English characters supported?
Yes, if the PDF embeds the fonts it used. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Greek and accented Latin text are all extracted as Unicode and saved as UTF-8, so they display correctly in any modern text editor. A PDF that relies on a font it does not embed may produce garbled characters; that is a defect in the PDF, not in the extraction.
Can I convert a password-protected PDF?
Not here. The tool reports that the file is encrypted and stops. Open it in a PDF reader, enter the password and save an unprotected copy, then convert that. This site does not attempt to bypass PDF passwords.
How many pages can I convert at once?
Up to 2000 pages in one job, and one page is processed at a time so the browser stays responsive. A document with hundreds of pages takes a while, and the progress bar shows the current page throughout.
What happens to pages that fail?
A page that cannot be read is listed by number at the end, and the text from every other page is still returned. One damaged page does not throw away the rest of the document.