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PDF to Text (.txt)

Add your PDF, extract the text, then download it as a .txt file.

Text is extracted directly in your browser: the file is never sent to a server.
Drop your PDF here, or click to choose a file
One PDF file at a time

Extracted text (preview)

What this tool is for

This tool extracts the actual text stored inside a PDF and saves it as a .txt file — plain text, with no formatting. It's useful whenever you want to quickly reuse the content of a PDF in a text editor, a script, or any tool that only accepts plain text.

Practical use cases

  • Repurposing content: pull text out of a report to paste into an email or another document.
  • Feeding other tools: get plain text ready for a script, a search index, or an AI tool.
  • Quick reference: search a long PDF's content more easily once it's in a plain text file.

How to use this tool

  1. Add the PDF file you want to convert.
  2. Click “Extract text”: a preview appears.
  3. Download the result as a .txt file.

Key benefits

  • Fast extraction of all the text, page by page.
  • A universal .txt file, readable anywhere, with no special software.
  • Nothing is sent to a server — everything happens in your browser.

Practical tips

  • If you need to keep at least basic formatting (paragraphs), use the Convert PDF tool instead, which also offers .docx output.
  • If the preview shows little or no text, the PDF is probably a scan or image — try the PDF to PNG tool to view it instead.

Good to know

The resulting .txt file contains plain text only: no formatting, columns, tables, or images from the original PDF are kept. For a scanned PDF — an image of text rather than real text — extraction can't recover anything; that's an inherent technical limit of scanned documents, not a bug in the tool.

Common problems

An empty or near-empty preview almost always means the PDF is a scanned image rather than real text. Garbled characters can occasionally appear with PDFs that use unusual fonts or encodings — in that case, try opening the file in a PDF reader first to confirm the text is selectable there.

Frequently asked questions

The scanned PDF produces an empty file — why?+

A scanned PDF is an image of text, not real text: there's nothing to extract without optical character recognition (OCR), which this tool doesn't offer yet.

Is the layout preserved in the .txt file?+

No, a .txt file contains plain text only, with no formatting, columns, or images.

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