PDF to TXT Converter

If you get nothing back, your PDF is a scan

This is the first thing to understand about any "PDF to text" tool, and it decides whether this one is the right one for your file.

There are two completely different kinds of PDF. One was produced digitally — from Word, a web page, a design tool, an invoicing system — and contains real text objects. The other is a scan: a photograph of paper, where each page is one flat image. It looks like text to you, but as far as software is concerned there are no letters in it at all, just pixels.

This tool reads the text that is there. It does not do OCR — it does not look at pictures of letters and work out what they say. So a scanned contract, a photographed receipt or an old document run through a copier will come back empty or nearly empty, and that is not a failure of the file.

The quick test: open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If it highlights word by word, this tool will get everything. If your cursor draws a box over the whole page instead, it is an image and you need optical character recognition. Use the image-to-text tool for that — and the cursor test takes two seconds, so it is worth doing before you convert anything.

Layout is not preserved — and when that matters

The text comes out as a continuous stream per page, in the order the PDF stores it. For ordinary prose that is exactly what you want. For anything laid out in columns or cells it is not.

A two-column page — academic papers, newsletters, some reports — may come out with the columns interleaved, because the stored order does not always follow the reading order. A table loses its structure completely: you get the cell contents in a row with nothing to say which column they belonged to, which is unusable for data. If you need tables as data, converting to a spreadsheet is the right route, not text.

Line breaks within a page are not preserved either, so paragraphs run together. That is fine if you are going to search the text, count it, or paste it somewhere and reformat, and awkward if you wanted the shape of the original.

What it is genuinely good for

Quoting and searching. Getting a passage out of a long report accurately, rather than retyping it and introducing errors.

Counting. The word and character counts come free, which answers "how long is this document actually" — useful for translation quotes, editing estimates and submission limits.

Feeding something else. Text is the input format for almost everything — a summariser, a search index, a script, a language model. Extracting it first, and checking it looks sane, beats hoping another tool handles the PDF properly.

Pulling out one section. The page range is for exactly this: one chapter of a book, the appendix of a report, the three pages you actually need out of ninety.

Page markers

--- Page N --- is the default and worth keeping for anything long, because once text is out of a PDF you lose all sense of where you are, and a quote you need to cite has to be attributable to a page. The heavier ===== Page N ===== is easier to spot when you are scrolling fast. Choose None when the text is going straight into another program and the markers would just be noise to strip out.

Nothing leaves your browser

Worth saying for this tool specifically. The documents people extract text from are contracts, medical letters, bank statements, legal filings and unpublished drafts — the whole point is usually that the content is worth handling carefully. Here the PDF is read and parsed on your own machine.

Related tools

Image to Text (OCR) is the one to use when the cursor test says your PDF is a scan — it reads text out of images. PDF to Excel is the right route for tables, where text extraction loses the structure, and Word Counter gives a fuller breakdown than the counts shown here.