PDF to Text
Extract text from a PDF.
Drop a PDF here, or click to browse
Text is extracted in your browser — nothing is uploaded
About the PDF to Text
Extract the plain text from a PDF and copy or download it as a .txt file. The PDF to Text tool pulls the selectable text from every page in your browser using PDF.js — nothing is uploaded — so you can quickly reuse content without retyping it.
How to use it
- 1Drop in a PDF that contains selectable text.
- 2Watch the progress as each page is read.
- 3Review the extracted text in the box, with pages separated by blank lines.
- 4Copy it to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file.
Text-based PDFs vs. scanned images
This tool reads the text layer that most PDFs store — the same text you can highlight when you open the file in a reader. It works instantly on documents exported from Word, Google Docs, web pages and similar sources. Scanned PDFs, however, are just images of pages and contain no text layer, so nothing can be extracted from them here; those need optical character recognition (OCR) instead. If you get an empty result, your PDF is most likely a scan.
Common uses
- Copying quotes or data out of a report without retyping.
- Getting a plain-text version of a document for search, translation or note-taking.
- Pulling text out of a PDF to reuse in another document or email.
Frequently asked questions
- Why did I get no text from my PDF?
- The PDF is almost certainly a scan — an image of each page with no text layer. Extracting text from scans requires OCR, which this tool doesn't perform.
- Does it keep the original formatting?
- It extracts plain text with pages separated by blank lines. Layout, fonts and styling aren't preserved, since the output is a text file.
- Is my document uploaded to extract text?
- No. Text is pulled from the PDF locally in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.