PDF to Text

Extract the selectable text layer from a PDF, page by page, and download it as .txt.

Files are processed entirely in your browser and never uploaded.

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About this tool

A PDF's selectable text and its visual layout are two separate things internally — extracting "just the text" means reading the document's text layer directly rather than the pixels it's drawn as. That only works if the PDF has a text layer at all: a scanned document with no OCR applied is a picture of text, not text, and will come back empty.

How to use it

Upload a PDF and press Extract Text.
Every page's text is pulled out and joined with a blank line between pages.
Copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

Examples

A multi-page report

Page 1's paragraph text, followed by a blank line, then page 2's text, and so on — reading order isn't always perfectly preserved for complex multi-column layouts.

Common problems

The result is empty, or just a handful of characters.: The PDF is likely a scan with no OCR text layer — it's an image of a page, not real text. You'd need an OCR tool to extract text from a scan like that; this tool only reads what's already selectable.
Multi-column text comes out jumbled, mixing columns together.: PDF text order follows how the document was authored internally, which doesn't always match the visual reading order for multi-column layouts — this is a limitation of the format itself, not something this tool can reorder reliably.