PDF to Text
Pull the selectable text out of any PDF into a clean .txt file — all in your browser.
PDF to Text
Why extract text from a PDF?
Sometimes you do not want the layout, you just want the words: a quote to paste into a document, a block of content to reuse, something to feed into another tool, or simply the text out of a file you cannot otherwise copy from. Anyone who has tried to select text in a PDF knows it often comes out jumbled, breaks across columns, or refuses to highlight at all. This tool reads the PDF's text layer and writes it to a clean .txt file, grouped line by line into a sensible reading order. Tables it detects are kept as tab-separated rows so their columns stay roughly aligned in the plain text. If your PDF is a scan or an image with no selectable text, you can switch on OCR and it will read the words off the page images instead, on a computer or iPad. The honest framing is simple: you get ordered plain text, not a replica of the page. Spacing, columns, fonts and styling are not reproduced, because the output is plain text on purpose. Everything is processed in your browser, so the document never leaves your device.
How do I extract the text from a PDF for free?
Open your PDF and the tool pulls the selectable text into a clean .txt file, line by line in reading order, with any detected tables kept tab-separated so their columns stay roughly lined up. If the PDF is a scan with no selectable text, an optional OCR step reads the words off the page images on a computer or iPad. It is plain text by design rather than a copy of the layout, and it all runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded.