Convert PDF to text
Extract the text from a PDF, page by page, into a plain .txt file. Read it right here, copy it in one click or download the file. It all runs in your browser, so your PDF is never uploaded.
How to extract text from a PDF
Convert a PDF to text without uploading it
Copying text out of a PDF by hand is slow: selections jump between columns, line breaks land in odd places and a long report takes many rounds of copy and paste. PDF to text pulls out all the text in one go, page by page, and gives it to you as plain text that you can paste into an email, a note, a translation tool or a document of your own.
Everything happens in your browser. The PDF is read on your device by pdf.js, the PDF reader built into Firefox, and the text file is made on your device as well, so contracts, bank letters and medical records are never uploaded. One PDF of up to 60 MB and 500 pages can be converted at a time, and reading starts as soon as you drop it, with the progress shown page by page.
Extract text from a PDF, page by page
The text appears in a box under the result, so you can check it before you take it anywhere. Every page starts with a line such as --- Page 3 ---, which makes it easy to find where a passage came from or to delete the pages you do not need. Within a page, each line of the PDF becomes a line of text, in the order the PDF stores them, which for most documents is the reading order.
Copy text puts everything on your clipboard in one click. The download button saves the same text as a .txt file named after the PDF, so report.pdf becomes report.txt. The file is plain UTF-8 text, so accented letters, Greek and Cyrillic come through, and it opens in any text editor, in Word and in Google Docs.
Scanned PDFs and pages without text
A PDF can hold text in two ways. A PDF exported from Word, a browser or an accounting program stores the actual letters, and that text can be extracted. A scanned PDF, or a photo of paper saved as a PDF, stores a picture of the page. This tool reads only stored text and does not recognize words in pictures.
When a page has no stored text, the file says so instead of leaving a gap: "No text found on page 4 (it may be a scanned image)." If no page of the PDF has any text, you get a message instead of an empty file. A quick test is to try to select a word in your PDF reader: if you cannot, the page is a picture.
For scanned pages in English or Spanish, use OCR PDF instead. It reads the words in the picture of each page, gives you a searchable PDF and a .txt file, and also runs in your browser.
What plain text leaves out
Plain text has no layout. Bold, italics, fonts, colors and pictures are left out, and a table comes out as lines of words with no columns. Text in two columns may come out one column after the other or mixed line by line, depending on how the PDF was made. That is the price of a file that opens anywhere; check the box before relying on the order.
If you need the pages to look the same, PDF to JPG turns them into images instead, and the PDF editor changes words inside the PDF itself. More conversions to and from PDF are listed on the PDF converter page.