PDF to Text
Extract text from any PDF file directly in your browser. Copy the text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file. No upload required.
About PDF to Text
This PDF to text converter extracts all readable text from a PDF file, right in your browser. Upload a document, and the tool pulls out the text content page by page. You can then copy it to your clipboard or download it as a plain text file.
How It Works
The tool uses Mozilla's PDF.js library to parse the PDF structure and read each page's text layer. It processes pages sequentially and labels each section with the page number, making it easy to find specific content in long documents.
What This Tool Can and Cannot Do
It works well with PDFs that contain selectable text - documents created from Word files, web pages, or any digital source. It will not extract text from scanned documents or image-only PDFs, since those need OCR processing.
Related Tools
Need to go the other direction? Use the Text to PDF tool to create a PDF from plain text. You can also split a PDF into smaller documents before extracting text from specific sections.
All processing happens client-side. Your PDF never leaves your browser, making this safe for confidential documents.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the PDF text extraction work?
The tool uses the PDF.js library (the same one Firefox uses) to parse the PDF structure and extract all text content. It processes each page in sequence and combines the results.
Can it extract text from scanned PDFs?
No. This tool extracts text that is digitally embedded in the PDF. Scanned documents are essentially images and would need OCR (optical character recognition) software to extract text.
Does the tool preserve formatting?
It extracts the raw text content from each page. Basic reading order is preserved, but complex layouts like multi-column pages or tables may not appear perfectly formatted in the output.
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. The entire extraction process runs in your browser. Your PDF never leaves your device.
Is there a page limit?
There is no hard limit. However, very large PDFs with hundreds of pages may take longer to process since everything runs locally in your browser.