PDF to Text Converter
Strip a PDF down to its words: no fonts, no images, no layout, just a .txt file you can search, paste, diff, feed to a script or drop into a translation tool. Scanned pages are read with OCR first.
PDF Converter
or drop PDF files here ·
Max 95 MB per file· Up to 20 files· Deleted after 30 minutes
Files are processed on our servers and deleted after 30 minutes.
Scanned PDFs are pictures of pages. Auto runs OCR only on pages without a text layer; On forces it for every page.
The language printed in the scan. Picking the right one noticeably improves accuracy for accents and non-Latin scripts.
Flowing text reflows into normal paragraphs that are easy to edit. Exact layout places every block where it was, which looks identical but is harder to edit.
Where detected tables go in the workbook.
Page numbers or ranges separated by commas, e.g. 1-3, 5, 8-10.
How to use this tool
- 1
Drop in the PDF
Upload a single PDF or a set of up to 20, each up to 95 MB. Mixed files with typed and scanned pages are handled page by page.
- 2
Narrow it down if you like
Plain text is already selected under Convert to. Use Pages to convert in Advanced settings to extract just the chapter or appendix you need.
- 3
Download the .txt
Press Convert to Plain text. The file is UTF-8 encoded, so accents and non-Latin scripts appear correctly in any modern editor.
What is the cleanest way to get text out of a PDF?
Convert it to a plain .txt file. You get every word in reading order, with paragraphs separated by blank lines and nothing else, ready for any editor or program.
What PDF text extraction keeps and drops
The converter walks each page in reading order, top to bottom and column by column, and writes the characters it finds. Lines that belong to one paragraph are joined, and paragraphs are separated by a blank line. Each page's text follows the previous page's, so a chapter reads as one continuous passage.
Everything visual is discarded: fonts, sizes, colors, images, charts and the position of text on the page. That is the point. A 10 MB report full of photos typically shrinks to a text file of a few hundred kilobytes, which is easier to search, compare between versions with a diff tool, or paste into a translation or analysis tool.
Command-line users may know pdftotext from the Poppler and Xpdf projects, which does a similar job on digital PDFs. The difference here is OCR: pages with no text layer are recognized in the language you choose instead of coming out blank. For pictures that are not PDFs at all, use image to text.
Plain text, Markdown or Word: pick the right output
Plain text
Words only, UTF-8.
- Smallest file
- Opens in anything
- No headings or formatting
Markdown
Text with light markup.
- Headings marked with #
- Lists and bold kept
- Still a text file
Word document
Full editable layout.
- Tables and images kept
- Styles preserved
- Needs a word processor
Why the text file is so small
1 byteper English letter, digit or space in a UTF-8 text file
Portable Document Format
PDF was created by Adobe in 1993 and became the open ISO 32000 standard in 2008. It fixes text, fonts, images and layout so a document looks the same on every screen and printer. PDFs can contain forms, signatures, links, attachments and searchable text, and the PDF/A variant is used for long-term archiving. The fixed layout makes PDFs hard to edit, and scanned PDFs contain only images unless OCR is applied. Every browser and operating system can open them.
- Compression
- –
- Transparency
- Yes
- Animation
- No
- Introduced
- 1993 · Adobe
TXT
Plain text
A TXT file contains only plain characters with no formatting, fonts, images or layout. Modern text files are usually encoded in UTF-8, which covers every language, though older files may use other encodings and show garbled characters. Plain text is tiny, never becomes obsolete and opens on every device, from phones to servers. It cannot hold bold text, tables or pictures, so structure must be expressed with spacing or simple markup.
- Compression
- –
- Transparency
- –
- Animation
- –
- Introduced
- –
People pull plain text out of a PDF when the words are all they need, for search, quoting, translation, data cleaning or feeding another program, and the layout only gets in the way.
PDF to text FAQ
Why can't I just copy and paste the text from the PDF?
You can for a paragraph or two, but copying from a PDF viewer often breaks words at line ends, mixes up columns, adds page headers in the middle of sentences and does nothing at all on scanned pages. Extraction reads the whole file in reading order and runs OCR where there is no text layer.
What encoding is the text file?
UTF-8, the encoding the web and most software default to. Windows Notepad has saved new files as UTF-8 by default since Windows 10 version 1903, and macOS TextEdit, VS Code and every browser read it without asking. If an old program shows strange characters, look for an import option that lets you pick UTF-8.
Is TXT the same as the PDF to TXT tool?
The output is identical: a .txt file. This page focuses on getting text out for reuse; PDF to TXT is the same conversion under the file-extension name people also search for.
What happens to tables?
Table cells are written in reading order, separated by tabs, so a table pastes into a spreadsheet reasonably well. If the tables are the reason you are converting, PDF to Excel keeps rows and columns in real cells instead.
Can I get the text with headings marked?
Plain text has no way to mark a heading. Choose Markdown under Convert to if you want headings, lists and bold text marked up with simple symbols while staying a text file.
Does extracting text from a scan work for handwriting?
OCR is built for printed text. Neat block capitals are often read, but cursive handwriting is not reliable. Typed or printed scans at 300 dpi give the best results.
| PDF to Markdown | PDF to Word | PDF to EPUB |
| TXT to PDF | Image to text | HTML to TXT |
