PDF to Text Extractor
Extract the plain text from any PDF - page-by-page output with clean line breaks. Copy or download as a .txt file, all in your browser.
About the PDF to Text Extractor
The PDF to Text Extractor reads any text-based PDF and outputs the plain text, page by page, ready to copy or download as a .txt file. The tool uses Mozilla's PDF.js - the same library that powers Firefox's built-in PDF viewer - so extraction is reliable and accurate.
Pages are clearly marked with separators so you can keep track of where content came from. The output preserves the document's reading order and respects line breaks as they appear in the PDF. Scanned image-based PDFs return little or no text - those need OCR, which this tool does not perform.
Common use cases
- Pull quotes or references out of an academic paper or PDF book
- Convert a PDF report into editable text for summarization
- Extract terms from contracts or legal documents for search
- Migrate content out of PDF archives into a wiki or CMS
Tips for best results
If your PDF returns empty or scrambled text, it is almost certainly a scanned image (a photograph or scan of paper) rather than a true text PDF. Open it in any PDF viewer and try to select and copy text - if you cannot, OCR is required. For OCR, use a dedicated OCR tool first to convert the scan to a text PDF, then run this extractor on the output.
Privacy & data handling
The PDF to Text Extractor runs entirely in your browser. Files you upload are never sent to a server - the conversion happens locally on your device, and the files are released as soon as you close the tab. No signup, no daily limit, no watermarks.
Why does my extraction look garbled?
The most common cause is a scanned PDF - what looks like a text page is actually an image of a page. The fix is OCR (optical character recognition), which converts pixels back into text. The second most common cause is a PDF using a non-standard or embedded font subset that PDF.js cannot fully decode. Some text may extract correctly while symbols appear as boxes.
How accurate is the extraction?
For modern text-based PDFs (generated by Word, Google Docs, LaTeX, browser print-to-PDF, etc.), extraction is essentially perfect. Reading order is preserved, line breaks are reasonable, and special characters survive. The accuracy drops on PDFs with multi-column layouts (the columns may interleave) and on tables (cell boundaries are lost).
Is there a file size limit?
No hard limit, but browser memory is finite. PDFs up to ~200 MB extract reliably; beyond that, the tab may run out of memory and crash. If you have an enormous PDF, split it first using the PDF Splitter and extract pieces.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Not directly. PDF.js requires the password to unlock the file. As a workaround, open the PDF in any viewer with the password, save a copy without the password, then run extraction on the copy. Or use the PDF Password Protect tool to set a new password on an unlocked version.
Does the extracted text preserve formatting?
Plain text only - bold, italic, font sizes, and colors are dropped. Line breaks and page separators are preserved. For formatted output, use the PDF to HTML tool instead, which keeps paragraph structure and lets you re-style with CSS.
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