PDF to Text Converter
Extract all the text from a PDF as clean, copyable plain text, either joined into paragraphs or with the original line breaks. Nothing is uploaded.
Click to upload a PDF
Its text is extracted on your device
Works with any PDF that has selectable text.
How to use this tool
- Click the upload area and choose a PDF. The text is extracted straight away.
- Choose 'Paragraphs' to join wrapped lines into clean paragraphs, or 'Original lines' to keep every line break.
- Turn page markers on or off depending on whether you need to know which page text came from.
- Copy the text, or download it as a .txt file.
About this tool
Copying text out of a PDF by hand usually goes wrong in the same ways: every line ends in a hard break, words split by a hyphen at the end of a line stay split, and headers come out jumbled. This tool extracts the whole document at once and cleans that up for you. In Paragraphs mode, lines that belong together are joined into a single paragraph, using the spacing between lines and where each line ends to decide where one paragraph stops and the next begins. Words the PDF hyphenated across a line break are put back together. The result pastes cleanly into an email, a word processor, a spreadsheet note or an AI chat box. Original lines mode keeps every line exactly where it broke in the PDF, which is what you want for poetry, addresses, code listings, or when you need to match text to its position on the page. Page markers label where each page begins. Leave them on when you are quoting or citing and need page numbers; turn them off when you just want the running text. The PDF is read by PDF.js, the same engine Firefox uses to display PDFs, running inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, so it is safe for bank statements, medical letters and anything else confidential. A scanned PDF is a picture of text rather than text itself, so it will come out empty: that needs OCR, which this tool does not perform.
Frequently asked questions
How do I extract text from a PDF?
Upload the PDF and the text appears immediately. Click 'Copy text' to put it on your clipboard or 'Download .txt' to save it as a plain text file.
Why does my PDF come out empty?
It is almost certainly a scan. A scanned page is a photograph with no text layer, so there is nothing to extract. Getting text out of it requires OCR software.
What is the difference between Paragraphs and Original lines?
Paragraphs joins the wrapped lines of each paragraph into one continuous line and rejoins hyphenated words, which is best for pasting into other documents. Original lines keeps every line break as it appears in the PDF.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The text is extracted in your browser and never leaves your device.
Does it keep tables?
Table cells come out as text in reading order, with spaces between cells on the same row, but the table grid itself is not preserved. Plain text has no way to represent one.