What Does "PDF to Text" Do?
This tool extracts the plain text content from a PDF and saves it as a .txt file — no formatting, no images, just the raw text. It's the quickest way to copy an entire document's text out for pasting elsewhere, searching, or processing with other tools, without opening the PDF and selecting text by hand.
How to Extract Text from a PDF — Step by Step
- Upload your PDF. Drag and drop one or more PDF files into the box above.
- Convert. Click "Convert" — the text is extracted automatically.
- Download. Download the .txt file individually or all at once as a ZIP.
Why Use Our PDF to Text Converter?
- Extracts every page's text in one step, including multi-page PDFs.
- Batch support for extracting text from multiple PDFs at once.
- Private — files are automatically deleted within 2 hours.
- Free, with no signup required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this work on scanned PDFs?▾
No — this extracts existing selectable text from the PDF; a scanned/image-only PDF has no underlying text to extract without OCR.
Is formatting preserved?▾
No — the output is plain text only, with page breaks marked between pages for multi-page documents.
What if my PDF is password-protected?▾
Remove the password first with our Unlock PDF tool, then extract the text.
Related Tools
- Compress PDF — Reduce PDF file size without losing quality.
- Merge PDF — Combine multiple PDFs into one file.
- Merge PDF and Image — Combine PDFs and images into a single PDF.
- Split PDF — Split a PDF into separate files by page range.
- Crop PDF Page — Crop margins or content area from PDF pages.
- Organize PDF — Reorder, delete or duplicate PDF pages.