PDF to Text — Extract All Text From a PDF Free
Pull clean plain text out of any PDF in your browser — for pasting, editing or feeding to other tools. Free and private.
Drop your PDF here or click to choose
converted on your device — contracts and documents are never uploaded
ℹ️ Honest scope: text, headings, bold/italic, images (at their original resolution), page size and page breaks are rebuilt into an editable document. Tables and multi-column layouts come out as plain paragraphs, and charts drawn as vector shapes are not carried over yet — no converter rebuilds those perfectly, and the ones that claim to are guessing.
Plain text is the most portable form a document can take, and the cases for it keep multiplying: pasting a report into an AI assistant without the layout noise, running a word count on a manuscript, feeding a contract to a translation tool, or indexing a folder of PDFs so they can be searched. In each of those the formatting is a hindrance, and what you need is the words in order. This page is set to produce a .txt file, nothing else.
Getting the words in the right order is harder than it sounds, because a PDF stores text as positioned fragments rather than as sentences. The extractor reads those fragments with their positions, rebuilds lines and paragraphs, and re-joins words hyphenated at a line end, so the output reads as prose rather than a ragged list. Some things are deliberately lost: images, fonts, bold and italic, colours and page geometry are gone, which is the point of plain text. Some things are flattened: a table becomes its cells in sequence, a two-column layout becomes one column, and running headers, footers and page numbers usually appear inline wherever the page break fell. The extraction happens in your browser, so the file is never uploaded, and the length of the document only affects how many seconds it takes.
More sizes & options
- PDF to Word — all options
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- PDF to Word Offline — Works Without Internet, Free
- Convert Confidential PDFs to Word — Nothing Leaves Your Device
- Hindi PDF to Word — Words Kept Whole, Kruti Dev to Unicode, Free
- Kruti Dev PDF to Unicode Word — Also DevLys, Free, No Upload
Frequently asked questions
- Why is this better than copy-pasting from the PDF?
- PDF viewers copy text in drawing order, which often scrambles columns and breaks every line. This tool reconstructs reading order and paragraph flow, and repairs hyphenated line-breaks.
- Can it read scanned PDFs?
- No — scans are images of text. The tool detects this and sends you to our OCR tool (Image to Text), which handles scans on your device.
- Is there a page limit?
- None. Processing is local, so a 500-page PDF costs us nothing and costs you a few seconds.
- What happens to tables and columns in the text file?
- A table is written out cell by cell in reading order, without the grid, and columns are merged into a single flow. The words are all there, but you will need to restore the structure yourself.
- Are accented characters and other languages preserved?
- Yes, when the PDF contains real text rather than a scan. Accented letters and non-Latin scripts come through as ordinary characters. The rare exception is an old PDF with a custom font encoding, where some letters may appear as symbols.
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🔒 Your files are processed on your device. This tool runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.