PDF to Text Converter — Extract All Text
Extract all selectable text from a PDF into plain text you can copy or download. Runs in your browser. No upload — runs 100% in your browser
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How to use this tool
- Drop a PDF onto the box.
- The text of every page appears below, page by page.
- Copy it straight from the box, or Download it as a .txt file.
Where the text comes from
A text-based PDF stores every character once, with coordinates for where to paint it. Extraction reads that stored text directly — so the result is exact, including punctuation and special characters, with none of the recognition errors OCR introduces. The trade-off: if your PDF is a scan (a photograph of pages), there is no stored text and the output will be empty. In that case the pages need OCR, which is a different, heavier process.
What people use it for
Copying quotes out of papers and ebooks, pulling contract clauses into email, extracting data from reports for spreadsheets, feeding documents to AI assistants, and making archived PDFs searchable by turning them into plain text files.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. Everything on this page runs inside your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your file never leaves your device — you can even disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the tool still works.
Why is there no text in the output?
Scanned PDFs are images of pages, not text — there is nothing to extract without OCR (recognition). This tool reads real text layers; image-only scans come out empty.
Is the layout preserved?
No — this extracts raw text content. Columns and tables come out as reading-order lines, which is what you want for copying into documents or feeding to other tools.
Does it work with encrypted PDFs?
PDFs that open without a password work fine. Files that demand a password to open cannot be read here.