Convert PDF to text
Free, private and fast: everything runs in your browser and your PDF file is never uploaded.
Why turn a PDF into plain text
Copying text out of a PDF reader works for a sentence, but for a whole document it drags along odd line breaks, skips pages or stops at the end of the screen. This tool reads the text layer of every page and gives you one plain text file in UTF-8, ready for a text editor, a translation tool, a script or a search. The text also appears on the page with a Copy button, so you can paste it somewhere without downloading anything. Choose how pages are separated: a short marker line such as "--- Page 2 ---", an empty line, or a form feed character for tools that count pages that way. Many PDFs, especially scans, have no text layer at all; the tool tells you which pages are affected instead of handing you an empty file.
How to extract text from a PDF
- Drop your PDF in the box, or click to choose it.
- Choose what goes between pages.
- Click Extract text, then download the .txt file or copy the text from the box below.
What changes when you convert
Scanned PDFs have no text
A scanner or a phone camera stores each page as a picture. Unless OCR (text recognition) was run when the PDF was made, there is no text to extract, and this tool does not do OCR. Pages without text are listed by number, so a PDF that mixes typed pages and scanned attachments is still useful.
Columns and tables
The text comes out in the order the PDF stores it. For normal paragraphs that is the reading order. Newspapers with several columns, forms and tables can come out column by column or with cells run together on one line, so check them before you rely on the result.
Strange characters
Some PDFs, often older ones or files from certain print drivers, use fonts without a table that says which letter each shape is. Their text can look right on screen but come out as nonsense symbols. That is a property of the file; another tool reading the same text layer gets the same result.
Layout is not kept
A .txt file has no fonts, bold text, images or page layout, only characters and line breaks. Headers, footers and page numbers printed on the pages are part of the text and appear on every page.
About the formats
PDF (Portable Document Format) was created by Adobe in 1993 and has been an ISO standard since 2008. A PDF looks the same on every device, which is why it is used for contracts, invoices, forms, manuals and scanned documents.
- A page can hold text, vector graphics and images, each placed exactly.
- Scanned documents are usually one image per page.
- A PDF can be protected with a password that is needed to open or edit it.
Plain text
A plain text file (.txt) holds only characters and line breaks: no fonts, colours, images or layout. That makes it the most portable document format there is, readable by every editor, search tool and programming language.
- The encoding decides how letters beyond A-Z are stored; UTF-8 covers every alphabet.
- Windows ends lines with CR LF, Mac and Linux with LF; current editors read both.
- There is no page layout, so page breaks are written as marker lines or form feed characters.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The text is read by your browser on your own device, and neither the PDF nor the text is sent anywhere.
Which encoding does the text file use?
UTF-8, which keeps letters such as æ, ü and é, and characters from other alphabets. Every current text editor, including Notepad on Windows 10 and 11 and TextEdit on a Mac, opens it correctly.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Not if it needs a password to open. Remove the password in your PDF reader first, then extract the text here.
Can I get the text of only some pages?
The tool reads the whole document. To get a few pages, extract those pages into a new PDF first and convert that file, or keep the page markers and delete what you do not need in a text editor.