PDF to Text
Pull the plain, copyable text out of a PDF and save it as a .txt file.
Select a PDF
Click to choose, or drop a file here
About extracting plain text from a PDF
Sometimes you just want the words — to paste into an email, feed to another program, or check a word count — without any formatting. This tool pulls the raw text out of a PDF into a .txt file.
Extraction happens in your browser using the PDF's own text layer, so it is fast and exact for digital PDFs. Scanned documents contain no text layer and will come out empty unless you OCR them first.
How to PDF to Text
- 1
Open the tool
Open the PDF to Text tool and drop your file onto the page, or click to browse for it. Everything runs in your browser — the file is never uploaded.
- 2
Extract the text
Click Extract to pull the plain, copyable text out of the PDF.
- 3
Download the .txt file
Download the text file or copy the contents from the page.
Related PDF tools
PDF to Text — frequently asked questions
Does this work on scanned PDFs?+
Only if the PDF already has a selectable text layer. A purely scanned image has no text to extract — run OCR PDF first, then convert the result.
Will tables and columns come out in a readable order?+
Text is reconstructed line by line from each glyph's position on the page, so simple layouts read naturally. Multi-column pages and dense tables may interleave — for those, PDF to Markdown or PDF to Excel usually preserves structure better.
What happens to images and formatting?+
Only text is extracted — no images, fonts, or layout. It's meant for quickly getting plain, copyable text out of a document.
Do you upload my files to a server?+
No — every tool here processes your files entirely on your device, and nothing is uploaded to a server. The only exception is the AI tools, which send the extracted text (not the file) to Claude to do their work.
Is there a file size limit?+
There's no artificial limit we impose, but since processing happens in your browser, very large files (500+ MB or 1,000+ pages) are limited by your device's memory rather than by us.
Advertisement
Advertisement