PDF to Text Converter
Pull the text out of any PDF as clean plain text. Lines are put back in reading order with paragraph breaks, ready to copy or save as a .txt file.
- Files stay on your device
- No sign-up
- Free to use
How to use PDF to Text
- Drop your PDF onto the upload area or browse to select it.
- Choose whether to add a marker line between pages, and enter a page range if you do not need the whole document.
- Select Extract text. The text appears in the box below.
- Copy it to the clipboard or download it as a .txt file.
PDF to Text features
Reading-order reconstruction
Characters are regrouped into lines and paragraphs by their position on the page, not by the order they were stored in.
Optional page markers
Insert a “Page N” separator so you can find where each passage came from.
Page range filter
Extract a chapter or a single page without processing the rest.
Word and character count
See the size of the extracted text at a glance.
Local extraction
The PDF is read in your browser; its contents are not uploaded.
When to use PDF to Text
- Quoting passages from a report or paper without retyping.
- Feeding document text into a spreadsheet, translation tool or search index.
- Getting text from a PDF that blocks ordinary copy and paste selection.
- Checking what text a PDF actually contains for accessibility review.
PDF to Text FAQ
Why is the result empty for my scanned PDF?
A scanned document contains images of pages, not text characters, so there is nothing to extract. Use the PDF OCR tool to recognise the text first.
Does it keep formatting such as bold or tables?
No. The output is plain text. Columns of a table are separated by spaces so rows stay readable, but fonts, colours and layout are not represented. For formatted output use PDF to Word; for tables use PDF to Excel.
Why are some words joined or split oddly?
PDFs store characters with positions rather than spaces. When letters are spaced unusually, as in justified or stylised text, the gap detection can misjudge a word boundary.
Does it work with right-to-left or non-Latin text?
Text in any script that is stored as real characters is extracted. Complex right-to-left layouts may come out in visual rather than logical order, depending on how the PDF was produced.
Is the file sent to a server?
No. Extraction happens entirely in your browser.
How text is stored in a PDF
A PDF page does not contain sentences. It contains drawing instructions such as “place these glyphs at this coordinate”. A single line may be stored as several fragments, and the fragments are not necessarily in reading order. Extracting usable text means collecting every fragment, sorting by vertical then horizontal position, and deciding where the gaps are wide enough to be spaces or column breaks.
This tool treats fragments that share a baseline as one line and starts a new paragraph when the vertical gap is clearly larger than normal line spacing. That works well for single-column documents. Multi-column pages are read straight across, so text from adjacent columns may be interleaved; splitting such pages or copying a column at a time gives better results.