PDF to Text
Pull the text out of a PDF — copy it or save it as a plain .txt file.
Get the words out of a PDF without retyping them. This tool reads the text layer of every page and gives it to you as plain text, keeping the reading order and line breaks, ready to paste into an email, a document or a spreadsheet.
It works on PDFs that contain real text — exported from Word, Google Docs, a website or most accounting software. Scanned PDFs are pictures of pages and have no text layer; the tool tells you when that is the case. Nothing is uploaded: the text is read in your browser.
Drop your PDF file here to extract its text
or click to browse
Frequently Asked Questions
How to Convert a PDF to Text
Copying text out of a PDF by hand is slow and often scrambles line breaks. This tool reads the text layer of every page and hands it to you as clean plain text, in reading order, ready to paste or save as a .txt file.
- Drop your PDF onto the page (or click to choose it).
- Wait a moment while each page is read — progress is shown page by page.
- Choose whether to mark where each page starts.
- Click "Copy Text" to paste it elsewhere, or "Download .txt" to save it.
A PDF that was exported from Word, Google Docs, a web page, an invoicing system or most other software contains real text: the letters are stored as characters, which is why you can search them and select them. This tool reads those characters directly, so the result is exact — no guessing, no recognition errors.
When plain text is what you need - Quoting a passage from a report or contract in an email. - Moving the wording of an old PDF into a new document without retyping it. - Pasting statement lines into a spreadsheet to sort or total them. - Giving the text of a long PDF to a search, translation or summarising tool.
What comes out — and what does not You get the words in reading order with their line breaks. Formatting such as fonts, bold, columns and table borders is not part of plain text, so a two-column page comes out as lines that may need a little tidying, and tables arrive as rows of words separated by spaces. If you need to keep the look of a page rather than its words, convert the PDF to images instead.
Scanned PDFs have no text to extract A scanned document is a photograph of a page. It looks like text but contains only an image, so there are no characters to read. The tool tells you when a file — or some of its pages — has no text layer. Extracting words from scans needs OCR (optical character recognition), which is a different job this tool does not attempt.
Private by design The PDF is read inside your browser; neither the file nor the extracted text is sent anywhere. That matters for the documents people most often need text from: contracts, payslips, medical letters and bank statements.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I convert a scanned PDF to text here?
No. Scanned pages are images, so there is no text layer to read. The tool will tell you the page is empty; you would need an OCR tool for that kind of file.
Will tables and columns be kept?
Not as tables. The words come out in reading order with line breaks; columns and table cells become plain lines that may need light tidying.
Why does some text come out with odd spacing?
PDFs store text as positioned fragments rather than sentences. The tool joins fragments on the same line with a space, but unusual layouts — justified text, letter-spaced headings — can still produce extra or missing spaces.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
If the PDF needs a password to open, unlock it first with Unlock PDF (you must know the password), then extract the text from the unlocked copy.
Is there a page limit?
No fixed limit. Very long documents simply take a little longer, since every page is read on your own device.