PDF to Text

Pull the text layer out of a PDF and save it as a plain .txt file, with the reading order and the columns intact.

Drop your files here

.pdf · up to 300 MB

Choose files

Flowing paragraphsKeep page layout

More settings

PagesMark page breaksRejoin hyphenated wordsEncoding

How to Extract text

1
Add your PDF
Drop in one file or up to twenty. The document is opened by your own browser, so nothing travels over the network.
2
Pick flow or preserved layout
Flow rebuilds paragraphs for reading and editing; preserve keeps the words where they sit on the page, spaces and all.
3
Download the .txt
Press the button and save the file. A batch of PDFs comes back as one ZIP of text files.

Reading order comes from the page, not from the file

A PDF stores text as thousands of positioned fragments, drawn in whatever order the program that made it happened to use. Read them back in that raw order and a two-column article turns into alternating half-sentences. This tool ignores the file order and rebuilds the page: fragments are grouped into lines by their baselines, lines are grouped into columns by the empty gutters running down the page, and columns are read left to right. Paragraphs end where the vertical gap grows past the normal line spacing, and words broken across a line with a hyphen are put back together. What you get is text you can paste into an email, a translator or a script without cleaning it up first.

Layout, encoding and page ranges

Flow layout is for reading: one paragraph per block, no ragged line breaks. Preserve layout keeps the original geometry by padding with spaces, which is what you want for receipts, listings, code and anything where the columns carry meaning. Output is UTF-8 by default, with a BOM variant for older Windows tools and a Windows-1251 option for legacy Cyrillic systems; if too many characters do not fit that codepage, you are told before the file is written rather than after. Page markers can be switched off, and you can extract a range such as 1-3, 5 instead of the whole document.

The document never leaves your device

Extraction runs inside your browser tab: the PDF is parsed in memory, the text is assembled there, and the .txt is handed straight to your downloads folder. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is queued on a server, and there is no copy for anyone to delete later. Close the tab and it is gone, which is what makes contracts and medical records safe to run through it.

Frequently asked questions

Why does nothing come out of my scanned PDF?

Because a scan is a picture of text, not text. There is no text layer to extract, so you get a clear message and a link to OCR, which reads the letters off the image and makes the document searchable. After that, extraction works normally.

What is the difference between flow and preserve?

Flow joins lines back into paragraphs and drops the original line breaks, which is best for reading and editing. Preserve keeps every word at its position on the page using spaces, which is best for tables, receipts and fixed-width listings.

How are columns and tables handled?

Columns are detected by the empty gutter between them, so the left column is read in full before the right one starts. Table rows stay rows: a grid of narrow cells is never mistaken for columns, so the cells of one row stay on one line.

Are hyphenated line breaks fixed?

Yes, in flow layout. A word split as infor- at the end of a line and mation at the start of the next is rejoined into information. Real hyphens inside words, such as de-hyphenation, are left as they are.

Does it handle Cyrillic, Arabic and Chinese?

Yes. The text is written as UTF-8, so every script the PDF contains survives the trip, including Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. Windows-1251 is offered only for legacy Cyrillic workflows that need it.

What happens to the formatting?

It is dropped, because a .txt file has none. Bold, colours, font sizes, images and tables do not survive. If you want headings, lists and links kept as structure, convert to Markdown instead, or to Word for a full editable document.

Is my file uploaded to a server?

No. The whole job runs in your browser using its own PDF engine. The file is never sent anywhere, works with no account, and keeps working if your connection drops halfway through a large document.

How large a PDF can I extract?

Up to 2 GB per file, and up to twenty files at once. Pages are processed one at a time and nothing is rendered, so a five-hundred-page document stays well within a few hundred megabytes of memory.