PDF to Text
Extract plain text from a PDF as a .txt file — free and processed entirely in your browser.
About PDF to Text
Sometimes you just need the words out of a PDF — to paste into another document, search through, or process with a script — without any of the formatting, images, or layout. This tool extracts the plain text and saves it as a .txt file.
This works on PDFs with a real, embedded text layer — the kind created digitally from Word, a website, or similar. A scanned PDF that's just a photo of a page has no embedded text to extract. Everything runs locally in your browser.
How to Extract Text from a PDF
Step 1
Upload your PDF
Drag and drop the PDF you want to extract text from.
Step 2
Extract the text
The embedded text layer is read directly from your PDF.
Step 3
Download your text file
Save the result as a plain .txt file.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will this work on a scanned PDF?
Only if it has a real text layer underneath the scan (some scanning software adds one). A pure image scan with no embedded text has nothing to extract, since there's no OCR step here.
Will formatting like bold, headings, or tables carry over?
No — this extracts plain text only, with paragraph breaks preserved but no formatting.
How is this different from your PDF to Word tool?
PDF to Word rebuilds the text as an editable Word document; this outputs the same underlying extracted text as a plain .txt file, for when you don't need Word formatting at all.
Is my document uploaded anywhere?
No. Extraction happens entirely in your browser.