PDF to Text
Extract clean plain text from any PDF.
About PDF to Text
Pulls the text out of a PDF as a plain .txt file, rejoining lines that were wrapped by the layout and optionally removing the running headers and footers that repeat on every page. Useful for quoting, searching, feeding into another tool, or reading a document without its formatting.
When you want the words and nothing else, extracting plain text is faster and far more reliable than converting to a document format that has to guess at layout.
The output is the text of the document in reading order, ready to paste anywhere.
- Processed on your deviceEverything you open or type here is handled by this page and never uploaded anywhere.
- No queue, no limitsNothing waits on a server, so the only limit is your own hardware.
- No account neededNo sign-up and no email address required.
How PDF to Text works in your browser
PDF.js walks each page and returns its text items with coordinates. Items are sorted into lines by vertical position and joined by horizontal order, which reconstructs reading order for ordinary single-column pages.
Word spacing is inferred from the gaps between runs, because a PDF does not necessarily store spaces as characters — a line can be twenty separately positioned fragments with no space anywhere in the file. This is why naive extraction produces text with words jammed together.
Two limits are worth stating plainly. Multi-column layouts extract across the page rather than down each column, because nothing in the file says which fragments belong to which column. And a scanned PDF contains images of text, not text: there is no OCR here, so those pages yield nothing at all rather than something wrong.
When to use it
Pulling quotations out of a long report without retyping them. Feeding a document into a script, a spreadsheet or a search index. Checking what text a machine can actually read from your CV before sending it to an employer. Reading a PDF whose fonts render badly on your device, where the words matter and the layout does not.
Read more about this
Frequently asked questions
Why is the text out of order on some PDFs?
Text is read in the order the page positions it, which for a two-column layout means the columns can interleave. Single-column documents extract cleanly.
Can it read a scanned document?
No. Scans hold images rather than text, and extracting them needs OCR, which is not included in this release.