PDF to Text

Extract text from a PDF, cleanly and privately

The PDF to Text converter pulls the words out of a PDF and gives them to you as plain, editable text. Lines are rebuilt from the position of every piece of text on the page, so words are spaced correctly, paragraphs stay separate and table columns stay apart instead of running together.

Use it to quote a report, reuse the content of an old brochure, paste a contract clause into an email, feed a document into a translation tool, or count the words in a PDF. When you are done, copy the text with one click or save it as a .txt file.

All processing happens in your browser with the open-source PDF engine used by Firefox. The document is never uploaded, which makes it safe for payslips, legal papers and anything else you would rather keep to yourself.

How to use the PDF to Text

1. Drop a PDF onto the upload area or click it to choose one. The text of every page is extracted straight away.
2. To get only part of the document, type pages or ranges in “Pages”, for example 3-7, 12.
3. Keep “Add page separators” ticked to see where each page starts, and tick “Join lines into paragraphs” if you want flowing text without line breaks.
4. Read or edit the result in the text box; the word and character counts update as you go.
5. Press “Copy text” to paste it anywhere, or “Download .txt” to save it.

PDF to Text features

Why some PDFs have no text to extract

A PDF made from Word, Google Docs, a web browser or accounting software stores real characters, so its text can be extracted exactly. A PDF made by a scanner or a phone camera usually contains only pictures of pages. To the computer they are photos, and there are no letters to copy.

For those files you need OCR (optical character recognition). Convert the pages to high-resolution images with PDF to JPG at 300 DPI, then run them through Image to Text. Some scanners add an invisible OCR text layer automatically; if yours did, this tool will extract it.

Getting the cleanest result

• Multi-column layouts such as newspapers and academic papers are extracted in the order the text was written into the file, which is usually column by column.
• Tables come out one row per line with tabs between cells. Paste them into a spreadsheet to get the columns back.
• Headers, footers and page numbers are extracted too. Turn off page separators and use Find and Replace to remove repeated lines quickly.
• Strange symbols instead of letters mean the PDF uses a font without a proper character map. The text cannot be decoded reliably — use OCR on an image of the page instead.
• To check the length of the result against a limit, paste it into the Word Counter.