Extract text from PDF instantly

Extract text from PDF files in your browser. No upload, no signup. Your documents never leave your device.

Drop your PDF file here

or click to browse

Your files stay private
No server upload
Instant conversion

 

Example

Input (PDF)

[report.pdf]
A 5-page text-based PDF report
File size: 320 KB

Output (TXT)

[report.txt]
Extracted plain text (all pages)
File size: 18 KB (UTF-8)

About this converter

Need to grab the text from a PDF without installing Adobe Acrobat or uploading to some random website? This converter uses Mozilla's pdf.js library to parse the PDF and extract all text content, page by page. The output is plain UTF-8 text. It works well for text-based PDFs like reports, articles, and contracts. Scanned PDFs that are essentially images will return empty or garbled text because there is no OCR step involved. The extraction runs entirely in your browser. Your PDF is not sent anywhere.

The parser processes every page in the document and concatenates the results into a single text file. Simple single-column layouts extract cleanly. Multi-column documents, tables, and complex page designs can produce jumbled output because PDF stores text as positioned glyphs, not as paragraphs. That is a fundamental limitation of the PDF format, not this tool. If you copy text from the same PDF in Chrome's built-in viewer and it looks wrong, the issue is in the PDF itself.

Common use cases include extracting content from reports for analysis, pulling text from contracts for review, and grabbing article text for citation or archiving. If you need an image of the PDF page instead of text, try PDF to JPG for a compressed image or PDF to PNG for pixel-perfect lossless output.

PDF vs TXT

Portable Document Format (PDF)

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a file format developed by Adobe for presenting documents consistently across different platforms and devices.

Common uses: documents, forms, reports, and print-ready files

ISO 32000-1 (PDF specification)

Plain Text (TXT)

TXT is a plain text file format containing unformatted text, readable by virtually any text editor or operating system.

Common uses: notes, logs, code, and simple documents

How to convert PDF to TXT

  1. 1

    Select your PDF file

    Drag and drop a .pdf file onto the converter or click to browse. The PDF is read locally using pdf.js, the same library Firefox uses to render PDFs. Nothing is uploaded.

  2. 2

    Wait for text extraction

    The parser processes every page in the document. Simple documents extract in under a second. Larger PDFs with many pages may take a few seconds since everything runs in your browser.

  3. 3

    Review the extracted text

    Check the output for correctness. Single-column text documents extract cleanly. Complex layouts with tables, columns, or text boxes may have ordering issues. Scanned PDFs will produce no text since OCR is not performed.

  4. 4

    Download or copy the text

    Save the output as a .txt file or copy it to your clipboard. The text is plain UTF-8 with page content concatenated in order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated: 2026-03-23