← Back to all tools
📃

PDF to Text

Extract plain text from PDF — clean, UTF-8, ready for search or LLM input

Drop your PDF file here

or

Max file size: 200MB

100% Local Processing
Zero Server Uploads

About PDF to Text

PDF to Text pulls every word from a PDF into a clean UTF-8 .txt file. Headings, lists, and tables are preserved in a readable structure; hyperlinks, fonts, and images get stripped (that is what "plain text" means). The output is ready to paste into a search index, a spreadsheet, a language-model prompt, or anywhere else structured text is useful.

Because the extraction happens in your browser, nothing gets uploaded anywhere. The engine uses the same multi-stage pipeline that powers our PDF to Word converter — full glyph-level extraction, reading-order reconstruction, list + table detection — just with a simpler output writer. The result is dramatically cleaner than the usual "copy text from Acrobat" dump, which tends to reorder columns, break words across line wraps, and leak running headers into body prose.

Scanned PDFs work too. When a page has no selectable text, the engine automatically runs OCR on it using Tesseract — same local-only guarantee.

How it works

  1. Drop your PDFDrag a PDF onto the converter or click to browse. Up to 100 MB. Files stay on your device.
  2. Extraction runs in your browserThe engine walks every glyph, rebuilds paragraph + list + table structure, and serializes to plain text — no server contact.
  3. Download the .txtOne UTF-8 text file. Opens in any editor or pipe it to any tool that reads text.

When to use PDF to Text

Feeding a PDF to an LLM
ChatGPT / Claude / local LLMs work best with clean plain text. The converter gives you exactly that — no markup, no artifacts.
Searching across many PDFs with grep / ripgrep
Command-line search tools don't read PDFs. Convert your archive to .txt first, then grep with zero friction.
Copying content into a spreadsheet or notes app
Skip the "copy from Acrobat, paste, fix column order" dance. The engine already handled reading order.

Frequently asked questions

Is the output structured at all?
Yes. Headings get a = underline under them, lists keep their bullets / numbers, tables use a minimalist aligned-column layout. Running headers and footers are dropped (they're page chrome, not content).
Does this work on scanned PDFs?
Yes. If a page has no selectable text, the engine automatically OCRs it with Tesseract (English by default; 14 other languages available in the settings). Still 100% local.
Why does reading order look better than copying from Adobe?
The engine does real multi-column layout analysis — whitespace gutter detection, zone decomposition, cross-page paragraph stitching — before serializing. A two-column article comes out as one column at a time, not interleaved row-by-row.

Related tools

PDF to WordConvert PDF to editable Word document with smart layout analysisPDF to MarkdownConvert PDF to GitHub-flavored Markdown with tables, lists, and linksMerge PDFCombine multiple PDFs into one fileCompress PDFReduce PDF file size without losing quality