PDF to Text
Extract selectable text from a text-based PDF and download it as a plain TXT file.
🔒 Processed locally in your browser.
Drop a PDF here or click to select
How to extract text from PDF
- Upload your PDF.
- Wait for the pages to be read in your browser.
- Click Extract & Download TXT.
- Open or copy the resulting text file.
What this tool is designed to do
PDF to Text is intended for digital PDFs that already contain selectable text. It reads the text layer available in the document and creates a simple TXT file that you can search, copy, edit or reuse in another application. This is different from OCR: OCR recognizes characters from page images, while this tool works with text that is already stored in the PDF.
A plain-text file deliberately does not reproduce the original page design. Fonts, colors, images, signatures and exact page geometry are left behind so that the result stays lightweight and easy to work with.
Important limitations
- This tool extracts text that already exists in the PDF. Scanned pages may contain little or no selectable text.
- For scanned documents, use OCR PDF instead.
- Complex page layouts, columns, tables, headers and unusual reading order may not reproduce perfectly in plain text.
- Hindi and other Unicode text can be extracted when the source PDF stores it as real text; image-only pages need OCR.
- Processing happens in your browser; the PDF is not uploaded to our server.
Related tools
Related reading
Frequently asked
Does this work with scanned PDFs?
Usually not by itself. Scanned pages are images, so use the OCR PDF tool to recognize their text first.
Will formatting be preserved?
No. The download is plain text, so fonts, colors and most visual layout are intentionally removed.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The extraction is performed in your browser.