PDF to Text — Extract the Text From a PDF, in Your Browser
Pull the text out of any PDF as clean paragraphs or line by line, copy it or save a .txt — nothing uploaded.
🔒 Runs in your browser — files never uploaded ⚡ No signup 💯 Free
Extract the text from a PDF without uploading it anywhere. The tool reads the document's text layer with pdf.js, rebuilds lines and paragraphs from the positions of the words (PDFs store text as scattered fragments, not sentences), and gives you plain text to copy or download. Choose all pages or a range, flowing paragraphs or exact line breaks.
If the PDF is a scan — an image of a page with no text underneath — it says so instead of returning a blank file.
How to use PDF to Text
- Drop the PDF. The page count and size appear.
- Pick a layout: flowing paragraphs for pasting into a document or an email, line by line for code, tables, addresses and poetry.
- Extract, then copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
Why PDF text comes out scrambled elsewhere
A PDF does not contain paragraphs. It contains drawing instructions — "put these characters at these coordinates" — and a word can be split across several instructions, a line across many, in whatever order the generating program felt like. Naive extractors print those fragments in file order and produce word salad. This tool sorts the fragments by position, groups them into lines by their baseline, inserts spaces from the gaps between fragments, and treats an unusually large vertical gap as a paragraph break. Hyphenated line endings are re-joined in paragraph mode.
What it cannot do
- Scanned documents. A scan is a picture. There is no text to extract; you need OCR, which recognises letter shapes. The tool detects the missing text layer and tells you.
- Tables. Columns are preserved left to right on each line, but a table with wrapped cells will interleave. Use line-by-line mode and expect to tidy.
- Multi-column layouts. Newspaper columns are read across rather than down, because there is no way to know from coordinates alone where a column ends.
- Protected PDFs. A password-protected file cannot be opened at all.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser: the file is read into memory, parsed by pdf.js (the same engine Firefox uses to display PDFs) and never leaves your device. That makes it fine for contracts, medical letters and anything else you would not upload to a random website.
To turn pages into images instead, use PDF to image; to split a long document first, split PDF.
Frequently asked questions
The output is empty or says there is no text layer — why?
The PDF is a scan or a photo: its pages are images, with no characters underneath. Extracting text from an image is OCR, a different job that recognises letter shapes. This tool reads only the text a PDF actually contains.
Why are some lines joined or split oddly?
PDFs store text as positioned fragments, and the tool reconstructs lines and paragraphs from coordinates. Unusual spacing, columns and tables can confuse the heuristics. Switch to "line by line" to keep every line exactly as laid out on the page.
Does it keep formatting like bold and headings?
No — the output is plain text. Bold, italics, fonts and colours are not part of a text file. Headings come through as their own lines or paragraphs, which is usually enough to reconstruct the structure.
Can I extract just some pages?
Yes: enter a range such as 1-3, 7. Blank means every page. Page-break markers are inserted between pages unless you untick the option.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. It is opened in your browser with pdf.js, the engine Firefox uses to display PDFs, and the text stays on your device. Safe for contracts and anything confidential.