PDF to Text
Extract all text content from a PDF document.
How to Use PDF to Text
- 1Upload your PDF file.
- 2Click 'Extract Text' — the tool will process each page in sequence.
- 3The extracted text appears in the text area, separated by page markers.
- 4Copy to clipboard or download as a .txt file.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this work on scanned PDFs?
No — scanned PDFs are images of text, not digital text. This tool extracts the text layer from digitally-created PDFs. For scanned documents, you need OCR software.
Will the formatting be preserved?
Plain text extraction captures words and sentences but doesn't preserve columns, tables, or precise spacing. For layout-aware extraction, desktop tools like Adobe Acrobat or pdftotext are more accurate.
What languages does it support?
Any language that's stored as digital text in the PDF, including Latin scripts, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and more. The text layer is language-agnostic.
Is there a page limit?
No. The tool processes every page sequentially, showing progress as it goes.
About PDF to Text
Extracting text from a PDF is useful for searching content, feeding it into an AI tool, archiving in plain text format, or copy-pasting into another document. Our PDF to Text extractor pulls the entire text layer from your PDF in seconds, right in the browser.
The tool uses PDF.js, Mozilla's battle-tested PDF rendering engine, to read each page's text content layer. Every text item is joined and separated by page markers, giving you a clean, readable output that's easy to search, copy, or download.
Important: this tool extracts the digital text layer that was embedded when the PDF was created or exported. Scanned documents — created by photographing or scanning paper — contain images rather than text, and require Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert. For OCR, try our upcoming Image to Text tool.