PDF to Text
Extract the plain text from a PDF, right in your browser.
About this tool
Pulls the plain text out of a PDF — no formatting, images, or layout, just the words, grouped into paragraphs using a simple spacing heuristic. Everything runs locally in your browser using the open-source pdf.js library; your file is never uploaded anywhere.
For a real editable Word document instead of plain text, use the Word ↔ PDF Converter. For a scanned PDF with no real text layer, convert it to JPG first with PDF to JPG, then run each page through Image to Text (OCR).
Frequently asked questions
- Why is the result empty?
- Some PDFs — especially scanned documents — are just images with no underlying text layer, so there's nothing for this tool to extract. Use Image to Text (OCR) on those instead.
- Why are some paragraphs split oddly?
- Paragraph breaks are guessed from the vertical spacing between lines, not read from the PDF's actual structure (PDFs don't really have "paragraphs" internally) — unusual layouts, multiple columns, or tables can confuse this heuristic.
- Are my files uploaded anywhere?
- No — extraction happens entirely on your device. Nothing is sent to any server.