Clean reading order
Text items are reassembled per page using their vertical positions, so lines join into paragraphs instead of arriving as one word per line the way naive extraction does.
PDFRuns in your browser
PDF to Text
Extract the readable text from any PDF into a .txt file.
- Upload
- Single file · 40 MB max
- Privacy
- Nothing is uploaded
- Cost
- Free · no sign-up · no watermark
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Processed entirely on your device
Your file is read, transformed and re-encoded inside this browser tab using JavaScript. There is no upload endpoint — nothing leaves your machine, nothing is stored, and the result is created as a local object URL that disappears when you close the page.
Overview
About the PDF to Text
Extract text from PDF files free online. Every page is read with pdf.js in your browser and saved as a clean .txt download — scanned pages are reported as empty.
PDF was designed to place glyphs on a page, not to carry meaning — which is why copying text out of one ranges from perfect to impossible depending on how the file was made. This tool reads the text layer properly and hands you plain text.
How extraction works
pdf.js, the same interpreter Firefox uses to render PDFs, walks each page's content stream and returns every text run with its position. Runs sharing a vertical position are joined into lines, lines are joined into page text, and pages are concatenated in order. Trailing whitespace is collapsed so the output reads like a document rather than a coordinate dump.
Reading the summary
- Pages read is the document's page count.
- Words and characters tell you at a glance whether extraction found real content.
- Pages without text lists the scan problem explicitly. A document where every page is empty is a scan; a document with two empty pages probably has inserted images.
What plain text is good for
Feeding a word counter, diffing two contract versions, searching a report offline, quoting a passage, or archiving the content of a document whose layout nobody needs. When you do need the layout, the PDF to JPG converter is the right tool instead.
Step by step
How to use the PDF to Text
Drop a PDF onto the upload area, or click it to browse.
Press Extract text — pdf.js reads every page in your browser tab.
Check the summary: pages read, words, characters and any pages without text.
Download the .txt file, which joins the pages in reading order.
Why use it
Benefits and common use cases
What this tool is good for, and what it deliberately does not try to do.
Scans are reported, not faked
A scanned PDF contains images, not text. The tool extracts nothing from those pages and lists them as pages without text, so you know OCR is the step you actually need.
Confidential documents stay local
Contracts, medical letters and financial statements are exactly the files you should not upload to a stranger's converter. pdf.js runs in your tab; the text never leaves it.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Short, honest answers about quality, limits and privacy.
My PDF produced almost no text. Why?
It is probably a scan: pages are photographs of paper, so there is no text layer to extract. The summary lists which pages came back empty. Turning scans into text needs OCR, which is a different technology from extraction.
Will the formatting match the original?
Paragraphs and line breaks are reconstructed from the position of each text run, which recovers readable prose from most documents. Columns, tables and footnotes may still interleave, because PDF stores placement, not structure.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
No. The encryption key is required before any content can be read, and it is never available to a browser tool. Remove the password in the application that created the file first.