Extract Text from a PDF
Pull the plain text out of any PDF, with page breaks preserved. Instant, free and completely private.
Drop a file, or click to choose
Pulls the real text layer out of a PDF. Nothing is uploaded.
How to use the PDF to Text
- 1
Drop in your PDF.
- 2
The text appears immediately, grouped into lines in reading order.
- 3
Copy it, or download it as a .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the output empty?
Your PDF has no text layer — it is a scan or a photograph of a page. Use the Image to Text tool, which runs OCR to recognise the characters visually.
Will the reading order be right?
For ordinary single-column documents, yes — fragments are grouped by vertical position and sorted left to right. Complex multi-column layouts and tables may interleave, which is a limitation of how PDFs store text rather than of this tool.
Is my data uploaded to a server?
No. Every tool on this site runs entirely inside your browser using JavaScript. Your input never leaves your device and is never sent over the network, which means it is safe to paste production data, API responses and tokens.