PDF to Text Converter
Pull the text out of a PDF, without uploading it.
File
Result
Your converted file will appear here.
About the PDF to Text converter
Copying text out of a PDF by hand tends to produce a mess: fragments in the wrong order, words split apart, columns interleaved. That is because a PDF does not store sentences — it stores glyphs with coordinates, and reading order has to be reconstructed.
This converter does that reconstruction, and does it on your device. PDFs are so often contracts, statements and reports that uploading one to a website to read it is a poor trade.
How reading order is rebuilt
Text fragments are grouped by their baseline into lines, then sorted left to right within each line, and the lines sorted down the page. Gaps wider than a space become spaces, so words that were stored as separate runs join up correctly.
This is why the output is usually far more readable than a copy-and-paste from a PDF viewer, which often emits fragments in storage order.
Reflow or keep the line breaks
By default each paragraph is joined into a single line, with blank lines separating paragraphs. That is what you want for reading, searching, or pasting into a document, because the original line breaks were decided by page width rather than meaning.
Keep the line breaks when the layout matters — code listings, tables, addresses and poetry all lose something when reflowed.
What does not come through
Formatting, fonts, colours and images are dropped; this produces plain text. Tables lose their structure, since a PDF table is only lines and positioned text with no notion of cells.
Pages that hold no text are reported in the summary, which is a quick way to spot a document that is partly scanned.
Frequently asked questions
It says my PDF has no text. Why?
The file is almost certainly a scan — a photograph of a page rather than text. There are no characters in it to extract, only pixels. Reading those needs OCR, which is a different job from what this does.
Does the layout survive?
Reading order does; visual layout does not. Multi-column pages are read column by column where the columns are clearly separated, but complex magazine layouts can still interleave.
What about password-protected PDFs?
They cannot be opened. Remove the password in your PDF reader first — this tool does not attempt to bypass or guess protection.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The document is opened, rewritten and saved entirely in your browser. That matters here more than most places, since PDFs are so often contracts, statements and medical records.