Convert PDF to text in your browser
This PDF to text converter reads the text layer of a PDF and gives you plain text you can paste into an email, a spreadsheet, a translation tool or your own code. The file is opened with pdf.js on your device, so confidential documents never leave your computer.
How the text is rebuilt
A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores pieces of text with a position on the page. The converter puts those pieces back in reading order: a new line starts where the original line ended or where the text moves down the page, and a space is added where there is a gap between words. A page that looks like this:
Quarterly Report
Revenue grew 12% this quarter.comes out as the same two lines. With page markers on, each page starts with a line such as --- Page 2 ---, which makes it easy to find where a passage came from.
Page ranges
Leave Pages empty to convert the whole document. Ranges use commas and dashes: 1-3, 5 converts pages 1, 2, 3 and 5; 8- converts page 8 to the end; -2 converts the first two pages. The status line shows the word and character counts of the selected pages.
Scanned PDFs
A scanned document is a set of pictures of pages. There is no text inside to extract, so those pages come out empty, and the tool tells you which ones. Reading text from pictures needs OCR (optical character recognition) software. Many scanners and phone scanning apps can add an OCR text layer when they save the PDF.
Layout limits
- Columns are usually extracted column by column, but some files store text in a different order than it appears.
- Tables come out as lines of text with spaces between cells, not as a grid.
- Hyphenated words at line ends keep their hyphen, as in the original.
Related tools
To turn pages into pictures instead, use PDF to JPG. To count or clean up the extracted text, try the word counter or the text formatter.