PDF to text converter
Pull the text out of a PDF to copy or save.
Runs in your browser. Your files never leave your device.
- Copy or download as .txt
- Batch convert several PDFs
- Nothing uploaded
How to convert PDF to text
- Drop your PDF files here.
- Wait for the text to be pulled out.
- Copy it, or download a .txt file for each PDF.
What extraction keeps and what it drops
- The plain text of every page, joined with a blank line between pages.
- Reading order follows the PDF's own internal text order, which is not always the same as the visual layout.
- Fonts, bold and italic styling, colors and images are not kept, only the words themselves.
- Tables and multi-column pages can come out with cells or columns interleaved rather than in neat reading order.
One file or several
Queue a single PDF and the extracted text also appears in a box on the page with a Copy button, ready to paste elsewhere.
Queue more than one PDF and each downloads as its own .txt file instead, or all of them together as one ZIP, since showing several documents in one box would not be useful.
Good reasons to pull text out of a PDF
- Copying a paragraph or clause from a contract into an email without retyping it by hand.
- Getting the wording of a report into a word processor so you can edit it freely.
- Comparing two versions of a document by pasting their plain text into a diff tool.
- Feeding the words from a PDF into another tool on this site, like Word counter, that only reads plain text.
PDF to text FAQ
Why is the text file empty?
Scanned PDFs are photos of pages with no text layer, so there is nothing to extract. Run it through Image to text instead, which reads text from a picture.
Does this keep the original formatting?
No. Columns, tables and fonts are not kept, only the plain text, in roughly the order it appears on the page.
Can I convert several PDFs at once?
Yes. Drop in as many as you like and download each .txt file, or all of them as a ZIP.
Is my document uploaded?
No. The text is extracted entirely inside your browser.
Does it keep paragraph and line breaks?
Each page's text is separated by a blank line. Breaks within a page follow the PDF's own internal text order, which usually matches the visible lines but is not guaranteed to.
Will a multi-column layout extract in the right order?
Not always. Extraction follows the order the PDF stores its text in, not the visual columns, so a two-column page can come out with the columns interleaved.
Does it work on password-protected PDFs?
Not directly. Remove the password first with Unlock PDF, then run the unlocked file through this tool.
What if only part of a page has real text?
That part still extracts normally. A page mixing a text paragraph with a scanned image only returns the paragraph, since the image portion has no text layer to read.