PDF to Text
Pull the text out of your PDF as a plain .txt file.
Drop your PDF
or
PDF up to 100 MB
Uploaded securely. This conversion needs a server; your file is deleted straight after.
About PDF to Text
Sometimes you do not want a Word document or a spreadsheet, just the words. Extracting to plain text gives you something you can search, grep, paste into a message or feed to another program, with no formatting in the way and no application needed to open it.
Text comes out in reading order, one line at a time, and each page is separated by a marker so you can still tell where a passage came from. Pages that turn out to be scans are labelled rather than left blank, so an empty result is never a mystery. If you need the table structure preserved, PDF to Excel keeps columns intact; for an editable document, PDF to Word is the better fit.
Frequently asked questions
Will this work on a scanned document?
No. A scan is an image of text, not text, so there is nothing to extract. We mark those pages clearly rather than returning a silently empty file. Reading a scan needs OCR, which this tool does not do.
Are page breaks kept?
Yes. Each page is separated by a marker so you can tell which page a passage came from, which matters when you are quoting or referencing the document.
Will the layout be preserved?
Text is extracted in reading order line by line. Columns and tables are flattened into lines; if you need table structure, use PDF to Excel instead.
Does my file get uploaded?
Yes. Unlike most tools here, extraction needs a server, so your PDF is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed, and deleted immediately afterwards. It is never stored or looked at.