PDF to Text Converter

How it works

1. Drop in a PDF.
2. Optionally name the pages you want, leave it blank for the whole document.
3. The text is pulled out on your own machine, page by page.
4. Download it as a plain .txt file.

About this tool

Extract the text stored in a PDF, with paragraphs and line breaks reconstructed from where the words sit on the page. Useful when you need to edit, search or quote the content rather than look at it. It cannot read a scanned document, a scan is a photograph of a page, where the words are pixels rather than characters, and pulling text out of those needs OCR. If you cannot select the words in a PDF reader, there is nothing here to extract either.

What this does, and what it does not

This extracts the words that are stored in the PDF. It reconstructs paragraphs and line breaks from where the text sits on the page, which works well for ordinary documents. It is not a layout conversion: columns, tables and text boxes come out in roughly the order the file stores them rather than the order you read them, and images, fonts and positioning are not preserved. If you need the page to look the same, render it as an image instead.

Why is my PDF empty?

Because it has no text in it. A PDF made by scanning paper is a photograph of a document, the words are pixels, not characters, and there is nothing to extract. Recognising text in an image needs OCR, which is a genuinely different and much heavier job than this. A quick test: if you cannot select the words with your cursor in a PDF reader, this tool will not find them either.

Is the order always right?

Usually, not always. A PDF stores text as positioned fragments with no notion of reading order, so anything reconstructing it is making an educated guess. Single-column documents come out reliably. Two-column academic papers, newsletters and anything with sidebars can interleave. Check the result before relying on it.