PDF to Text

1. 1

   Drop in your PDF

   Every page is read and its selectable text extracted, in top-to-bottom, left-to-right reading order.

2. 2

   Review the extracted text

   The full text appears in a scrollable panel, along with page, word, character and size counts.

3. 3

   Toggle page markers if needed

   Switch "Keep page markers" on to insert a marker line between each page's text, or off for one continuous block.

4. 4

   Copy or download

   Copy the text to your clipboard, or download it as a plain .txt file.

Extraction pulls exactly the text that is already selectable in the PDF — nothing is guessed, inferred or OCR-recognized. Text is grouped into rows by vertical position on the page, then ordered left to right within each row, which reproduces normal reading order well for single-column documents and reasonably for simple multi-column ones.

• Complex layouts — overlapping text boxes, rotated text, dense multi-column magazine-style pages — can come out with lines in an unexpected order, since the extraction relies on position heuristics, not real layout analysis.
• Scanned or photographed pages saved as images have no text layer at all, so nothing is extracted from them. Run them through an OCR tool first.
• Word and character counts are computed directly from the extracted text, so they reflect exactly what you see in the result panel — not the PDF's original word count if some text failed to extract.
• Spacing between words is inferred from horizontal gaps between text runs; unusual font kerning can occasionally cause a missing or extra space.

What this tool is, where it runs and what it costs — the facts people usually check before trusting a free tool with their work.

The pdf to text is one of 17 pdf tools on this site. These are the ones most often used alongside it — either because they handle the next step in the same job, or because they answer a question this tool raises.

Because the pdf to text runs entirely in your browser, it suits work you would not want to hand to a third-party server — client files, unpublished drafts, anything under an NDA. These are the situations people reach for it in most often.

Every method, threshold and standard this page relies on, with a link to the document that defines it. Check them — a tool that will not show its sources is asking you to take its word for it.

1. 1

   Document management — Portable document format — Part 2: PDF 2.0

   ISO 32000-2 · 2020

   Supports: The distinction between a PDF's selectable text layer and a scanned page with no text objects, which is why image-only PDFs return no extractable text.

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