PDF to Text
Get the text out of your PDFs as .txt files, with the PDF’s own line breaks or as whole paragraphs. No upload, no signup, no watermark.
Files stay on your device How it works
Drop files here, paste, or
PDF · up to 10 files, 100 MB each
Your files
Your file is ready
Text you can search, quote and reuse
Text locked in a PDF is awkward to work with: copying from a PDF viewer drags in broken lines, and some viewers copy one page at a time. A .txt file opens anywhere, on any device, and works with every search box, notes app and script. Use it to quote a passage, search a long manual, keep a lightweight copy of a document, or hand the words to another program.
How to use it
- Choose up to 10 PDFs, each up to 100 MB.
- Pick how lines should come out, and whether to mark the pages.
- Press Get the text, then download each .txt file, or all of them as a ZIP.
Two ways to handle lines
Keep the PDF’s line breaks gives you each line as it sits on the page, with a blank line between pages. Nothing is guessed, so it’s the faithful choice for forms, tables of figures and verse. Join lines into paragraphs undoes the wrapping that a page width forced on the text: lines are joined into whole paragraphs, headings get their own line, and list items start with a bullet or their number. That reads and pastes far better, at the cost of an occasional join in the wrong place.
Page markers
With Mark where each page starts ticked, each page begins with a line such as
--- Page 12 ---. That makes it easy to cite a page or to find a passage again in the PDF.
Opening the file
A .txt file opens in Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on a Mac, and the Files app on most phones; any code editor works too. The text is saved as UTF-8, so accented letters and other alphabets come through. Even a long manual makes a compact file without pictures or fonts, quick to open on a phone and to search with Ctrl+F or Cmd+F.
Good to know
- Scans and photos of pages hold pictures, not text, so there’s nothing to extract; the tool tells you when that happens. PDF OCR reads the text in them.
- Password-protected PDFs need the password removed first.
- For a resume, Resume to Plain Text is set up for job applications. For an editable document, try PDF to Word.