PDF to Text
Extract every word from a PDF into a clean .txt file — perfect for search, indexing or feeding another tool.
Drop your PDF here or click to browse
PDF or image files supported
Works on text-based PDFs. If the PDF is a scan (image of text), run OCR PDF first to add a text layer.
Extract text from a PDF as a .txt file
Turn any text-based PDF into a plain-text file you can search, index, feed into a script or archive forever.
PDF to Text pulls every readable character out of a PDF and hands you back a clean UTF-8 encoded .txt file. It preserves reading order page by page, drops the PDF's positioning metadata, and gives you plain text your editor, grep, spreadsheet or LLM can consume without any preprocessing.
The tool is the fastest bridge between a document you received as a PDF and any downstream text pipeline — search indexes, corpus analysis, translation memory, chatbot fine-tuning data, or simply archiving text so it stays legible 20 years from now, long after PDF renderers may have moved on.
How to use it
- 1Upload the source PDF (drag-and-drop or click the drop zone).
- 2Press Extract Text — processing is near-instant for text-based PDFs.
- 3The .txt file downloads automatically with page-separator markers (
=== Page N ===). - 4For scanned PDFs (images of text), the output will be empty — run OCR PDF first, then re-run this tool on the OCR'd copy.
Real-world use cases
- Feed a PDF into an LLM prompt or fine-tuning dataset — .txt is the universal input format.
- Grep through the contents of a large PDF from the command line.
- Archive the readable content of an old PDF in a format that will still open in 2050.
- Import PDF text into a spreadsheet after cleaning up whitespace.
- Build a search index over a folder of PDFs — extract to .txt first, then index.
Supported formats & limits
Input: any text-based PDF up to ~100 MB. Output: UTF-8 encoded .txt with per-page separator markers preserving reading order.
Privacy
Your uploaded file is written to a temporary folder on our server, processed, and deleted by the operating system as soon as the request finishes — typically within seconds. Nothing is stored in our database. Traffic is encrypted over HTTPS.
Full details in the Privacy Policy.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my output file empty?▾
The PDF has no text layer — it's a scan (an image of text). PDF viewers can display it but there are no character codes to extract. Run OCR PDF on the file first to add a real text layer, then extract text from the OCR'd copy.
Is the reading order preserved?▾
Yes for standard single-column and two-column layouts. Very complex layouts (magazine grids, side-bars, callouts) may interleave in an unexpected order — PDF stores text by drawing order, not logical order, so no extractor gets this perfect on complex art-directed pages.
Does the output include page breaks?▾
Yes — each page starts with a === Page N === marker so downstream tools can split easily. The marker is a plain ASCII line, safe for any text processor.
How is this different from PDF to Markdown?▾
PDF to Text gives you raw, unstructured plain text — the fastest thing to feed into scripts or LLMs. PDF to Markdown tries to preserve headings, lists and links using Markdown syntax — better for humans reading the output or publishing to a docs site.
What about tables in the PDF?▾
Table content comes through as text, cell by cell, but the tabular structure (rows / columns) is lost. If you need the table as structured data, use PDF to Excel instead — it detects table boundaries and outputs .xlsx.
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