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Convert from PDF

PDF to Text

Pull all the text out of a PDF as a plain .txt file.

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PDF to Text · overview

What PDF to Text does

PDF to Text pulls the text layer out of a PDF as plain text, grouping it into lines, ready to copy or download as a .txt file.

Sometimes you don’t want a formatted document — you just want the words: to paste into an email, feed to a script, search, or quote. PDF to Text extracts exactly that, the real text stored in the PDF, with no styling in the way.

The text is read in the browser with pdf.js and laid out as lines by its position on the page, then joined into one document with a blank line between pages. It appears in a preview you can copy straight to your clipboard, and downloads as a .txt file at the same time.

Step by step

How to use PDF to Text

  1. Upload a PDF

    Drop in a text-based PDF. Scanned PDFs have no text layer — OCR them first.

  2. Extract

    Click Extract text. Every page is read and the text appears in a preview.

  3. Copy or download

    Copy the text to your clipboard, or take the .txt file that downloads automatically.

Details & limits

PDF to Text: details and limits

  • This is plain text on purpose — formatting, fonts, colours, tables and images are all dropped. For editable structure use PDF to Word, or PDF to Excel for tables.

  • Text comes out in the PDF’s stored reading order, which is correct for ordinary single-column pages but can interleave on multi-column layouts; tables flatten to space-separated text.

  • A scanned PDF has no text layer to pull from, so the tool stops and points you to OCR PDF, and it reports any pages that had no selectable text.

PDF to Text · help

PDF to Text: frequently asked questions

Upload a text-based PDF and click Extract text. The text is pulled from every page, shown in a preview you can copy, and downloaded as a .txt file.

Next steps

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