PDF to Text Converter — Extract Text from PDFs
Convert any PDF to plain text in seconds. Copy to clipboard or download as a TXT file. 100% private — files never leave your browser.
Upload PDF File
Drag & drop or click to browse
How to Convert PDF to Text
- 1
Upload your PDF by clicking the box or dragging the file onto it.
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The text of every page is extracted in your browser within a few seconds.
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Review the text in the preview box.
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Click Copy to put it on your clipboard, or Download to save it as a .txt file.
PDF Text Extraction Features
Professional PDF to text conversion that respects your privacy
Full Text Extraction
Extract every word, paragraph, and table from your PDF while preserving line breaks and reading order.
Maximum Privacy
All conversion happens locally in your browser. No server upload, no storage, no tracking.
Instant & Free
Drag, drop, done. No signup, no watermarks, no email — just instant text extraction.
PDF to Text Guide
When to convert a PDF to plain text
Plain text is the most portable format there is. Converting a PDF to text is the quickest way to quote a report in an email, paste a paper into a translation tool or an AI assistant, feed documents into a search index, or reuse content from a PDF that does not let you select text comfortably. Unlike PDF to Word, the result has no formatting to clean up — just the words, in reading order.
What gets extracted
The converter reads the PDF's text layer with PDF.js. Lines are rebuilt from the position of each word, missing spaces between words are restored, and a blank line separates paragraphs. Running headers and footers in the top and bottom margins are skipped so they do not interrupt the text on every page.
- Works with PDFs exported from Word, Google Docs, LaTeX, browsers and most e-books.
- Supports English, European languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and more.
- Tables come out as lines of text; if you need the structure, try PDF to Markdown or PDF to Word.
Why is the extracted text empty or garbled?
Empty output means the PDF has no text layer: it is a scan or a photo saved as PDF, and needs OCR before any tool can read the words. Garbled characters usually mean the PDF uses a font without a proper character map — common in older or badly generated files. Opening the PDF in a browser, printing it to a new PDF and converting that copy often fixes it.
FAQ
Upload your PDF by dragging it into the converter. Text is extracted instantly and you can copy it to clipboard or download as a TXT file. No registration needed.
All standard digital PDFs are supported. Scanned (image-based) PDFs require OCR which this tool does not include. For scanned PDFs, use a dedicated OCR service first.
Yes — completely free, no signup, no usage limits, no watermarks. Everything runs in your browser.
Yes — try our PDF Word Count tool which shows word, character, sentence and paragraph counts plus reading time.
We support 30+ languages including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and major European languages. The tool auto-detects the document language.
Completely private. All text extraction happens via JavaScript in your browser. Your PDF is never uploaded to any server, never logged, and never stored.
First remove the password with our Unlock PDF tool, then extract the text here.
Convert Your PDF to Text Now
Free instant PDF text extraction. No signup, no upload, no compromises.