PDF to Text Converter

PDF to Text — extract text from PDF online, free, no upload

Extract all text from a PDF into a plain text file. This tool reads every page of your PDF and outputs the complete text content, ready to copy, search, or save as a .txt file. Perfect for repurposing PDF content, searching large documents, or feeding text into other tools.

How it works

1. Upload your PDF — processed locally in your browser using pdf.js.
2. The tool extracts text from every page automatically.
3. Copy the text or download as a .txt file.

Common use cases

• Repurpose content — extract text from a PDF report to use in a blog post or presentation.
• Search large documents — copy all text and search in your editor for specific terms.
• Data extraction — get raw text from PDFs for further processing or analysis.
• Accessibility — convert PDF content to plain text for screen readers or text-to-speech tools.

Limitations

• Works best with text-based PDFs. Scanned/image-based PDFs will return little or no text (use OCR for those).
• Formatting, tables, and columns are linearized — the output is raw text, not structured data.
• Very large PDFs (200+ pages) may take a few seconds to process.

What this tool actually extracts

PDFs come in two flavors: native (text was placed as text when the document was created) and scanned (the page is an image of text). This tool handles native PDFs — it pulls the actual text characters out, preserving reading order, paragraph breaks, and basic layout cues. For scanned image-only PDFs, use our Image to Text (OCR) tool instead, which runs Tesseract.js in your browser.

Use cases

• Text mining and analysis — feed extracted text into a script for keyword counts, sentiment analysis, or NLP pipelines.
• Quoting and citation — copy long passages without retyping from the screen.
• Accessibility prep — produce a plain-text version of a PDF for screen-reader-friendly distribution.
• Document classification — pull a few KB of text to feed a tagger or topic model before deciding where to file the PDF.
• Translation handoff — give your translator the plain text instead of the PDF, so they can use any CAT tool.

Reading order quirks

Multi-column documents (newspapers, academic papers, certain reports) can confuse text extractors because the underlying PDF stores text by position, not by reading order. This tool uses pdfjs-dist's layout-aware extractor which handles single and most two-column layouts well, but very complex layouts (sidebars, footnotes inside text frames, magazine-style flows) may produce text fragments out of order. Always sanity-check the output for important content.

Privacy

All extraction runs locally in your browser. Your PDF, the extracted text, and any text you copy stays on your device.

Extract once, use everywhere: text as the terminal output of your PDF workflow

Text extraction is a terminal step — you extract after you have the right pages (split to the section you need), in the correct order, and decrypted (unlocked if protected). The extracted plain text can feed word counters, case converters, translators, NLP scripts, and knowledge bases. For the cleanest output, extract from correctly oriented, well-formed PDFs — rotation and layout quality directly affect text layer accuracy.

• PDF Splitter — Extract only the pages you need before running text extraction — smaller sections process faster and produce cleaner, easier-to-verify output.
• Unlock PDF — Decrypt password-protected PDFs before text extraction can run — pdfjs-dist cannot read encrypted content streams.
• Rotate PDF — Correctly oriented pages produce better text extraction — both the text layer and layout-aware extractors work from the page's rendered orientation.
• PDF to JPG — Render pages as images when the PDF uses rasterized text (scans, image-only PDFs) that the text extractor misses — use the images as the visual source instead.
• PDF Merger — Combine chapters or sections before extracting all text in one pass so the output is a single continuous document rather than fragments.
• Word Counter — Count words, characters, and reading time from the extracted text, useful for compliance, billing, or translation scoping.
• Case Converter — Normalize the case of extracted text for downstream processing — all-caps scanned documents are common and often need lowercasing.
• PDF Metadata Editor — Check and update keyword metadata for the same document to improve DMS findability alongside the extracted text content.

Full guide: extract PDF text for analysis

Need a clean workflow for plain text extraction, OCR decisions, privacy, and analysis-ready cleanup? Read How to extract text from a PDF for analysis.

Related tools

People extracting text from PDFs often also use Word Counter, Case Converter, PDF to JPG, and PDF Merger.