Does it work on scanned PDFs?

No — scanned pages have no text layer. Use the OCR PDF tool first to recognise text from scans.

PDF to TXT

Pull all the text from a PDF and download it as a plain .txt file.

Drop a PDF

or click to browse your computer

Accepted: PDF · Files stay on your device

How to pdf to txt

1
Drop your PDF.
2
Click Extract.
3
Download the .txt and preview it below.

Understanding pdf to txt

Text extraction reads the text objects a PDF already contains and writes them out in reading order. It is instant and exact — but only for PDFs that were generated digitally.

A scanned PDF holds no text at all, only pictures of text, and will extract to an empty file. That is the moment to switch to OCR PDF, which reconstructs the characters from the pixels.

PDF stores text as positioned glyph runs rather than paragraphs, so extraction reconstructs reading order heuristically. Multi-column layouts and complex tables are where that heuristic strains.

When you would use it

—Pulling quotes out of a report without retyping them.
—Feeding document text into a search index or a spreadsheet.
—Word-counting a manuscript delivered as PDF.
—Checking whether a scanned document already contains a text layer.

Practical tips

An empty result is diagnostic, not a bug: it means the PDF has no text layer.
Two-column academic PDFs often interleave columns — expect to tidy the output.
Ligatures such as 'fi' occasionally extract as a single character; a search-and-replace fixes them.

Troubleshooting

The text is scrambled: Complex layouts break reading order. Extracting page by page usually gives cleaner results.
I get nothing at all: Use OCR PDF — the document is a scan.

Frequently asked questions

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