Files never leave your device.How it works
How to convert PDF to text
- 1Drop your PDF above (or click to select).
- 2Click Extract text.
- 3Download the .txt file with all the text.
Frequently asked questions
- Does my file get uploaded?
- No. The text is read entirely in your browser — your PDF never leaves your device.
- It says no text was found — why?
- Your PDF is probably a scan (images of pages) with no text layer. Run it through OCR PDF first to add a text layer, then extract.
- Will the layout be kept?
- The tool preserves reading order and line breaks, but not columns, tables, or exact spacing — it produces clean plain text, not a formatted document.
Get the words out of a PDF
When you need the actual text from a PDF — to quote it, search it, feed it to another tool, or drop it into a document — PDF to Text reads the file's text layer and reconstructs it line by line into a plain .txt file. It runs entirely in your browser, so even a confidential document never leaves your device.
Text, not layout
The tool keeps reading order and line breaks, which is what you want for copying and reuse, but it doesn't try to recreate columns, tables, or precise positioning — the result is clean plain text. Pages are separated by a blank line.
Scanned PDFs
A scanned PDF is a set of page images with no text layer, so there's nothing to extract. Run it through OCR PDF first to recognize the text, then come back and extract it here.
How the extraction actually works
A PDF with real text doesn't store paragraphs the way a Word document does — it stores individual glyphs positioned at exact coordinates on the page, along with a mapping back to character codes. PDF to Text walks through those positioned glyphs page by page and reassembles them into lines based on their coordinates, which is why reading order is usually right even though the PDF format itself has no real concept of "lines" or "paragraphs."
When extraction goes wrong
Occasionally a PDF was produced with a broken or non-standard font encoding — common in older documents exported from niche software — and the text comes out as garbled characters even though it looks fine visually. There's no fix for that from the extraction side; the text mapping inside the file itself is faulty. Multi-column layouts like newspapers or academic papers can also interleave in an unexpected order, since the tool reads by position, not by visual column.
What people use this for
Common uses include searching across a large document, pulling numbers or clauses into a spreadsheet, feeding a document into another tool that only accepts plain text, or making content accessible to a screen reader. For accessibility of the PDF itself, rather than extracted text, look at OCR PDF, which adds a real text layer without leaving the document.