PDF to Text

A PDF to text converter reads the text layer a PDF carries and writes it out as a plain .txt file, with the fonts, page furniture and images left behind. It is what you want when the content matters and the layout does not: quoting a report, feeding a document to a script, or getting a paragraph into an editor without the formatting arriving with it.

A PDF does not store text the way a text file does. It stores positioned runs of glyphs, and a run can be a single letter. There are no lines and no paragraphs in the file, only coordinates. So the work of converting a PDF to text is reassembly: grouping runs that share a baseline into a line, then grouping lines into paragraphs by the gap between them. This tool does both, which is why it gives you paragraphs rather than one line per visual line.

That reassembly is also where converters differ from each other. Two runs that sit flush against each other are one word, and a converter that joins every run with a space turns "filename" into "f i l e n a m e". A word broken across a line with a hyphen is one word, not two. The gap that starts a new paragraph depends on the document's own leading, so a fixed threshold works on one PDF and fails on the next. Those three cases are handled here, and they are the difference between output you can read and output you have to clean up by hand.

Two layout choices cover most needs. Reflow joins each paragraph onto one line, which is what to paste into a document or an editor. Preserve keeps every line break the page was laid out with, which is what to use for a table, a code listing, a poem, or anything where the lines mean something. Page markers are separate from both, and are worth turning on when you need to find a passage back in the original.

One limit is worth knowing before you start. If a PDF was made by scanning paper or photographing a page, its pages are images and there is no text layer to extract, so every converter returns an empty file. No tool can read it without optical character recognition. This one checks how much text it found per page and tells you when a file looks scanned, rather than handing back a blank .txt and leaving you to work out why. For those files, use the image to text tool instead.

Everything runs in the browser. The PDF is parsed in memory on your own machine, nothing is uploaded, and the download is generated locally, so a contract or a medical record does not leave your device to become a text file.