PDF to Text
Pull the embedded text out of a digital PDF and download it as plain text. Works on PDFs with selectable text; scanned PDFs without an OCR layer won't yield usable output.
Drop your file here
or click to choose from your device
Supported: pdf · Max 50 MB
pdf · 50 MB max
Going deeper
When extracting text beats copy-pasting
Copy-pasting text out of a PDF page-by-page is fine for a one-page document, but for anything longer it's painful. PDF to Text pulls the entire document's text in one pass, in reading order, ready to drop into a word processor, a search index, a translation tool or a content management system.
There are real limits to what text extraction can do. PDFs are a layout format, not a semantic one — there's no concept of 'paragraph' or 'heading' at the file level. Multi-column layouts sometimes get jumbled, footnotes end up inline with the body, and tables come out as a flat list of cells. For clean output, prefer PDFs that came from a word processor rather than a page-layout tool.
If your source is a scan, text extraction will return nothing useful (the file is just an image of text). You'd need OCR for that, which is on our roadmap. For now, you can use AI PDF Summarizer or Ask PDF — both will work with scanned pages if the AI can read the rendered image.
What you get
Features
Extracts text from every page in order
Output as downloadable .txt file
Handles multi-column layouts gracefully
No upload size surprises — up to 50 MB
Files removed from our servers immediately
Step by step
How to use
- 1
Upload a PDF that has selectable text (not a scan).
- 2
Click Extract.
- 3
Download the resulting .txt file.
Your privacy
How this tool handles your file
Your PDF is processed in an isolated temp directory and deleted immediately. The extracted text is returned to you and never persisted server-side.
Read more about our security practices or see our privacy policy.
Frequently asked
Common questions
Keep going
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