How to convert a PDF to text
- Select Choose files or drop your PDF on the box.
- Leave Mark each page on if you want a
--- Page 2 ---line before each page. - When the file is ready, select Copy to copy the text, or Download to save a
.txtfile. - If a PDF is locked, type its password in the Password box first.
What you get
A plain text file in UTF-8, so accented letters and scripts such as Hindi, Cyrillic and Chinese survive. Text that sits at the same height on a page is joined into one line, in left to right order, and lines run from top to bottom. Spaces are put back between words that the PDF stores as separate pieces. Images and drawings are skipped.
Scanned pages
Some PDFs, especially from scanners and phone apps, hold only a picture of each page. They have no text for the tool to read, so the result for those pages says This page is a scan. Everything else in the file is still converted, so mixed documents give you the text pages and a clear note on the rest. For scans you will need a tool with optical character recognition.
Good uses
Quoting a passage from a report, searching a long document in a text editor, feeding the words to a translation tool, checking what a PDF really contains, or making a PDF accessible by starting from its text.
Tips
- Want the pages as pictures instead? Use PDF to JPG.
- Count pages and see sizes first with the PDF page counter.
- Keep only the pages you care about with Extract PDF pages before converting.
- Long files are read page by page, so progress is shown.
The PDF is read on your device by the pdf.js library. Nothing is uploaded, which keeps contracts and personal documents private.