PDF to Text Converter
Pull the text out of a PDF so you can paste it somewhere useful. Every page is read in order, with optional page markers, and you can copy the lot or save it as a plain .txt file.
How to use the PDF to Text Converter
- Drop your PDF onto the box, or click to pick it.
- Wait a moment while each page is read — the status line shows the progress and the final word count.
- Copy the text straight to your clipboard, or download it as a .txt file. Untick the page markers first if you want continuous text.
About the PDF to Text Converter
A PDF stores text as positioned glyphs rather than as flowing paragraphs, which is why copying from a PDF viewer so often produces broken lines and lost spacing. This extractor reads the text layer through pdf.js and rebuilds line breaks from the vertical position of each fragment, which gets you much closer to readable prose. There is one thing it cannot do: if the PDF was produced by a scanner or a phone camera, the pages are images and there is no text layer to read at all — the extractor will correctly report that it found nothing. That is the point where you need optical character recognition instead, and the Image to Text tool on this site will handle it. Because the whole process runs locally, confidential documents such as contracts and statements never leave your computer.
Frequently asked questions
How do I extract text from a PDF without software?
Open the PDF here in your browser. The text layer is read on your own device and shown in an editable box you can copy from or download, with no program to install.
It says no text was found — what does that mean?
Your PDF is almost certainly a scan, so the pages are pictures of text rather than text itself. Run the pages through the Image to Text (OCR) tool instead, which reads characters out of an image.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is opened by your browser and processed in the page, which is why it works on confidential documents and continues to work offline once the page has loaded.
Why is the spacing different from the original PDF?
PDFs position each fragment of text individually, with no notion of paragraphs. Line breaks are reconstructed from vertical positions, so multi-column layouts and tables come out as a best-effort reading order rather than a perfect copy.
Related free tools
- Image to PDF — Turn JPG/PNG photos into a single PDF.
- Text to PDF — Type or paste text, get a clean PDF.
- PDF to Image — Convert every PDF page to a high-quality JPG/PNG.
- PDF Merge — Combine multiple PDFs into one — nothing uploaded.
- PDF Split — Extract a page range into a new PDF.
- Scratch Notepad — Auto-saving notepad that lives in your browser.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded. Last reviewed and updated .