About PDF to Text
Plain text works everywhere: it can be pasted into a note, fed to a script, translated, searched with grep or read by a screen reader. A PDF is the opposite — excellent for showing a document, awkward for reusing its words. Getting the text out is usually the first step before the real work, and doing it without uploading a confidential document is the difficult part.
This tool reads the PDF's text layer with pdf.js, rebuilds visual lines from positioned text runs and gives you a plain .txt file or clipboard copy. You can add page markers, work through a page range and preview the result before downloading. Scanned pages have no text layer at all, and the tool says which pages were empty rather than quietly returning a shorter document.
What this tool does
Readable line reconstruction
Positioned text runs are grouped back into lines with sensible spacing, so the output reads like the page instead of one word per line.
Preview, copy and download
Read the extracted text in the workspace, copy it with one click, or download a UTF-8 .txt file.
Optional page markers
Add Page 1, Page 2 headings between pages so you can trace a quote back to its source in long documents.
Page range selection
Extract the whole PDF or only the pages you need, with the same simple range syntax used by the other PDF tools.
Empty-page reporting
Pages without a text layer are counted and listed, which is the fastest way to spot a scanned section that needs OCR.
Local extraction
Text is read from the file in your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded and no copy of the document or its text is stored.
How to use PDF to Text
- 01
Add the PDF
Drop the file into the workspace. The page count is read locally so the range field knows its limits.
- 02
Select pages
Leave the field empty to extract every page, or enter a range such as 1-5, 9 to focus on the pages you need.
- 03
Decide on page markers
Leave the checkbox on if you want page headers in the text file for reference, or turn it off for clean prose.
- 04
Extract and review
Click Extract text, then read the preview. Missing pages are called out, and the word and line counts are shown.
- 05
Copy or download
Use Copy text for the clipboard, or Download for a .txt file that contains the complete text.
Supported formats and limits
- Input
- Output
- TXT
- Processing
- Client-side, in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
- Maximum size
- Up to 100 MB · 300 pages
- Requirements
- Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari
Limitations worth knowing
- No OCR: scanned pages contain no text layer, so they produce nothing to extract.
- Layout is flattened into plain lines; columns, tables, headers and footers can change order.
- Up to 300 pages and 100 MB per run; very long documents are better extracted in ranges.
- Custom font encodings or unusual character sets can come out garbled or with wrong spacing.
Privacy and file handling
The PDF is read and its text extracted entirely inside your browser tab. Neither the document nor the extracted text is uploaded to a server, and nothing is stored. The .txt file is created on your device and disappears from the page when you reset or close it.
Read the full privacy policy