PDF to Text

PDF to Text pulls the selectable text out of every page of a PDF and shows it in a box you can copy from or save as a .txt file. Choose a PDF and press Extract text. It is quicker than selecting text page by page in a viewer when you need to quote a report, reuse notes or paste a document into another program.

What the output looks like

Each page begins with a marker line, and all the text from that page follows as one continuous paragraph:

--- Page 1 ---
Annual Report 2025-26 Chairman's message The year saw steady growth in ...

--- Page 2 ---
Financial highlights Revenue from operations rose ...

Line breaks and runs of spaces inside a page are collapsed into single spaces, so headings run straight into the paragraphs after them. That is ideal for searching, word counts and pasting into a new document, but you will need to add paragraph breaks back yourself if layout matters. Use Copy text for the clipboard or Download .txt to save extracted-text.txt. There is no page limit for extraction.

Scanned PDFs contain no text to extract

A scanned document is a set of photographs of pages. There are no characters inside it, only pixels, so the tool finds nothing and tells you the PDF looks like a scanned image. To read those words you need OCR (optical character recognition): convert the pages with PDF to JPG, then run the images through the image to text (OCR) converter. In a mixed file, typed pages extract normally while scanned pages show only their page marker.

Layouts that come out jumbled

Text is returned in the order it is stored in the file. For ordinary documents that matches reading order, but some layouts do not survive:

• Multi-column pages such as newspapers and research papers can mix lines from neighbouring columns.
• Tables lose their columns and come out as a run of values.
• Headers and footers repeat on every page.
• Hyphenated line endings stay split, as in "docu- ment".

Hindi and other Indian-language PDFs

Documents created with Unicode fonts usually extract as real Hindi, Marathi or Tamil text, although vowel signs in Devanagari can occasionally land in the wrong position. Older documents typed in legacy fonts such as Kruti Dev are a different case: they store Devanagari shapes under English letter codes, so the extracted text looks like random Latin characters. Those need a font converter or OCR rather than plain extraction.

After extracting

Paste the text into the word counter to check the length of an essay or report, or into any editor to restore headings and paragraphs. Password-protected PDFs need to be unlocked first. The text is read from the file inside your browser tab and is not sent anywhere.