PDF to Text

What this tool does

This tool pulls the text out of a PDF so you can reuse it. Select a PDF and it extracts the words, shows them on screen, and offers a plain TXT file to download, all within your browser so the document never leaves your device.

How to use it

1. Select your PDF file.
2. Press Convert to extract the text.
3. Read the result on the page, and download it as a TXT file if you want to keep it. Reset clears the tool.

How it works

The tool reads the text that is stored inside the PDF, page by page, and gathers it into one block you can copy or download. It pulls out the words themselves rather than the layout, so what you get is plain text, ideal for copying content into another document, but without the original's fonts, columns, or styling. It all runs on your device, so nothing is uploaded.

The one thing it cannot do: scans

This is the most useful thing to understand before you start, because it explains the one case where the tool comes up empty. There are really two kinds of PDF. A digital PDF, the kind exported from Word, a browser, or most software, has the text stored inside it as actual text, and this tool reads that beautifully. A scanned PDF, made by a scanner or a phone camera, is really just a photograph of a page: it looks like text to you, but to the computer it is an image with no text stored in it at all. So when you run a scan through this tool, there is simply nothing to extract, and you get little or nothing back.

Pulling text out of a scan is a different and harder job called OCR, optical character recognition, which looks at the picture and works out what the letters are. This tool does not do OCR; it reads text that is genuinely there. If your scan returns nothing, that is the reason, and it is not a fault with the file. For a scanned page you would need a dedicated OCR tool instead. To handle the same job for other document types, the ODT, PPTX, and EPUB extractors pull text from those formats.

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