Convert PDF to text
Pull the text layer out of a PDF as plain .txt.
Drop your PDF here
PDF · up to 100 MB · pulls out the text that is already in the file
Processed in your browser. This file never leaves your device.
How to convert a PDF to text
- 01
Add your PDF
Drop a file into the box above and its pages render as thumbnails.
- 02
Pick pages, or don't
Select specific pages to read, or select nothing to read the whole document.
- 03
Extract
The tool reads the text layer already inside the file — nothing is recognised or guessed.
- 04
Download
You get a plain .txt file, encoded as UTF-8.
This reads text, it does not recognise it
A PDF made from a word processor, a spreadsheet or a web page contains the actual characters, stored as text. This tool pulls those out, and it is exact — every character is the one the author typed.
A PDF made from a scanner or a phone camera contains a picture of a page. It looks like text to you, but the file contains no characters at all. There is nothing here to extract, and this tool will tell you so rather than handing you an empty file and letting you work out why.
For scans, use PDF OCR first. That runs optical character recognition to turn the picture into real text, after which this tool works normally.
What happens to the layout
Plain text has no columns, no tables and no font sizes, so a faithful copy of a laid-out page is not possible. Text comes out in the document’s reading order, with line breaks where the PDF marks them.
We deliberately do not try to reconstruct columns or tables by guessing from text positions. It is a genuinely hard problem, and getting it slightly wrong produces interleaved nonsense that is harder to fix than plain reading order. If you need tables, use PDF to Excel or the Table extractor, which are built for exactly that.