Career
Resume to Plain Text
Pull the plain text out of your resume PDF, to paste into forms or see what it holds. No upload, no signup, no watermark.
Files stay on your device How it works
Drop files here, paste, or
PDF · up to 5 files, 100 MB each
Your files
Your file is ready
Why turn a resume into plain text
Two everyday reasons. Many online applications have plain text boxes, and pasting from a designed PDF brings odd breaks and symbols; a clean text version is easier to paste and tidy. And plain text shows what your resume actually contains as text: if a heading, your email or a whole section is missing or jumbled here, other software reading the PDF may run into the same trouble.
How to use it
- Choose your resume PDF, up to 100 MB. You can do up to 5 at once.
- Press Get the text.
- Download the .txt file and open it in any text editor, or on your phone.
What you get
A plain text file, named after your PDF, with each line of text on its own line and a blank line between pages. The note under it says how many pages and words were found. Formatting, such as bold, colors, columns and pictures, isn’t part of plain text, so it’s left out. Text is read with PDF.js, the PDF reader used in Firefox, inside your browser.
Reading the result
- Words in an odd order usually come from columns, tables or text boxes. That’s a hint the layout may be hard for software to follow.
- No text at all means the PDF holds pictures of text, such as a scan. Save it again as a PDF from your word processor.
- Strange symbols instead of letters can come from unusual fonts or icons; check the original PDF where they appear.
This is a plain reading of the text, not a judgement of your resume. For a full check of how applicant tracking software sees it, field by field, use Readback, our resume checker, which also runs on your device. If your resume is too big to upload, the Resume PDF Compressor makes it smaller without touching the text.