Apps / PDF Tools / PDF to Text
PDF to Text
Extract the text layer of a PDF into plain text you can copy or download. Pick a page range if you don't want the whole document. Nothing is uploaded.
Or drag & drop a PDF. Stays in your browser.
What is this?
A free, online PDF-to-text converter that runs entirely in your browser. Drop a PDF, get its text — copy it to the clipboard or download it as a .txt file. No upload, no signup, no watermark.
How does it work?
The text layer is read by pdf.js (Mozilla's PDF engine, the same one Firefox ships) directly in your browser tab. The file never leaves the page — there is no server-side processing at all.
FAQ
My output is empty — why?
The PDF has no text layer, which usually means it's a scan: every page is one big image. Text extraction can't help there; you need OCR. Render the pages with PDF to Images at 300 DPI and feed them to an OCR pipeline.
Why does the layout look different from the PDF?
PDFs position each fragment of text individually — columns, tables, and headers are visual arrangements, not structure. Extraction reads the fragments in document order, so multi-column layouts come out as sequential text.
What is the form-feed option?
With it on, pages are separated by a form-feed character (U+000C) instead of a blank line — the same convention as the classic
pdftotext CLI, handy when a downstream script needs to split the text back into pages.Encrypted PDFs?
Decrypt first — password-protected PDFs are rejected on load.