PDF to Text
Extract raw selectable text from your PDF document without formatting clutter.
Select a PDF to extract text
or drag and drop your PDF here to parse selectable text into a plain text document
How to Use PDF to Text
Upload PDF
Select the document containing text.
Extract
Text is parsed instantly on your device.
Copy or Save
Copy to clipboard or download as a text file.
Key Capabilities
Local Execution
Extracts unicode glyph streams directly from PDF content streams using in-browser Web Workers, preserving natural line breaks.
- •Ideal for extracting body copy, research quotes, and data tables.
- •Image-based scanned documents require OCR to extract text; use our OCR PDF tool for image-only scans.
Text Stream Extraction & Layout-Aware Tokenization
Coordinate-Aware Reading Order
PDF documents do not store text as sentences; they store positioned glyph coordinates. Our tokenizer sorts text items by vertical and horizontal baseline coordinates to reconstruct natural reading order.
Multi-Page Delimited Formatting
Extracted output separates consecutive pages with clear "--- Page N ---" headers, making the resulting plaintext file ideal for analysis, terminal pipelines, or LLM ingestion.
Unicode & Ligature Preservation
Standard typographical ligatures (such as "fi", "fl") and international accented characters are normalized into valid UTF-8 plaintext characters.
- •Scanned PDFs without digital text layers require OCR PDF before plain text can be extracted.
- •Downloads instantly as a clean .txt file without external software dependencies.
- •Files with password protection must be unlocked before text extraction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is no text extracted from my scanned PDF?↓
Scanned documents contain picture pixels rather than digital text characters. Use our OCR tool to recognize characters on scans.
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