PDF to Text Converter
Extract the text from any PDF and download it as a clean .txt file. Keep the original page layout or reflow it into readable paragraphs.
Drop your PDFs here to extract the text
or click to browse. Convert several files at once. Nothing is uploaded.
What is a PDF to text converter?
A PDF to text converter pulls the words out of a PDF and gives you back plain text you can edit, search, paste into another document, or feed into another program. A PDF stores text as positioned glyphs rather than as flowing sentences, which is why copying straight out of a PDF reader so often produces broken line breaks, missing spaces, and columns that run into each other. Extracting the text properly means reading those positions and rebuilding the reading order.
This converter does that work in your browser. It reads the text layer of the PDF, groups the individual text runs back into lines by their position on the page, orders them the way a person would read them, and then either preserves those lines exactly or joins wrapped lines back into full paragraphs. Nothing is uploaded to a server, so contracts, invoices, medical records and research papers stay on your own machine.
You can convert several PDFs in one pass, limit extraction to a page range, and add a page marker before each page when you need to trace a line back to where it came from. A single file downloads as a .txt file and a batch downloads as a zip archive.
How to convert PDF to text
- Upload your PDF: Drag one or more PDF files into the drop area, or click it to browse your device. The files are read locally and never sent anywhere.
- Choose a text layout: Pick Reflow paragraphs to join wrapped lines into full sentences, which is best for articles and reports. Pick Keep original lines to preserve every line break exactly, which is best for tables, forms, addresses and code.
- Set a page range (optional): Leave the pages field empty to convert the whole document, or enter something like 1-5, 8, 12- to extract only the pages you need.
- Add page markers (optional): Turn on page markers if you want a labelled divider before each page so you can trace any line back to its original page number.
- Extract the text: Click Extract Text. Each file is processed in turn and the result appears in the preview panel, along with a live word and character count.
- Copy or download: Copy the text straight to your clipboard, or download it as a .txt file. When you convert several PDFs at once, the download arrives as a single zip archive.
Reflow paragraphs or keep the original lines
The two layout modes solve different problems, and picking the right one is the difference between text you can use immediately and text you have to clean up by hand.
Reflow paragraphs measures the vertical spacing between lines and treats an unusually large gap as a paragraph break. Everything else is joined back together, and words split across a line break with a hyphen are rejoined into a single word. Use this for ebooks, articles, essays, reports and anything you plan to paste into a word processor or send to another tool.
Keep original lines writes each visual line as its own line of text and preserves the horizontal ordering within it. Use this for invoices, bank statements, tables, price lists, code listings and forms, where the row structure carries meaning that reflowing would destroy.
Why some PDFs return no text
There are two very different kinds of PDF that look identical on screen. A digital PDF, exported from Word, Google Docs, InDesign or a web page, contains a real text layer, and a converter can read it directly. A scanned PDF, produced by a scanner or a phone camera, contains only a photograph of a page. There are no characters in the file at all, just pixels arranged to look like characters.
If this tool reports that no selectable text was found, your file is almost certainly the second kind. Extraction cannot help there, because there is nothing to extract. What such a file needs is optical character recognition, which analyses the image and recognises the shapes as letters. A quick way to tell the two apart is to open the PDF in any reader and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If the text highlights, this tool will read it. If your cursor draws a box over the page instead, the page is an image.
Common reasons to extract text from a PDF
- Reusing content: lifting quotes, clauses or passages out of a report without retyping them.
- Search and analysis: getting a document into plain text so you can grep it, run word counts, or compare two versions.
- Feeding other software: most scripts, spreadsheets, translation tools and AI models accept plain text far more reliably than PDF.
- Accessibility: producing a clean text version of a document for a screen reader or a text-to-speech tool.
- Archiving: keeping a small, future-proof copy of a document's contents that will still open in fifty years.
- Migrating content: moving printed manuals, policies or documentation into a wiki or a content management system.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is this PDF to text converter free?
Yes, completely free with no account, no watermark and no page limit. You can convert as many PDFs as you like, as often as you like.
Are my PDF files uploaded to a server?
No. The conversion runs entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. Your PDF is read from your own disk and the extracted text never leaves your device, which makes the tool safe for confidential documents.
Why is the extracted text missing spaces or running together?
PDFs store text as separately positioned runs, and some generators split words across several runs without recording the spaces. This tool reinserts spaces by measuring the visual gap between runs, which handles the large majority of files. If a particular PDF still runs words together, switching between Reflow paragraphs and Keep original lines often produces a cleaner result.
Can I convert a scanned PDF to text?
Not with text extraction alone. A scanned PDF contains images of pages rather than characters, so there is no text layer to read. That kind of file needs optical character recognition, which recognises letter shapes in an image. If the tool reports that no selectable text was found, your PDF is a scan.
Does it keep tables intact?
Choose Keep original lines and the tool preserves each visual row as its own line, with the cells in their original left-to-right order, which keeps most tables readable. Plain text has no concept of columns, though, so if you need real cells you will want a dedicated table extraction step instead.
Can I extract text from only certain pages?
Yes. Enter a page range such as 1-5, 8, 12- in the pages field. You can mix single pages and ranges, and leaving the end of a range open means everything to the end of the document.
How many PDFs can I convert at once?
There is no fixed limit. Drop in as many files as you need and they are processed one after another. A single file downloads as a .txt file, and multiple files download together as a zip archive.
Does the converter work on a phone or tablet?
Yes. The tool runs in any modern mobile browser, so you can upload, extract, copy and download from a phone or tablet. Very large documents will simply take a little longer on lower-powered devices.
Will the text keep its bold, italic and heading formatting?
No, and that is by design. A .txt file is plain text with no styling at all. If you need the formatting preserved, convert the PDF to Word instead, which keeps headings and character styles as editable document formatting.
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