PDF to text
Pull the text out of a PDF into a plain text file.
- Free, no sign-up
- Files stay on your device
- PDF / up to 50 MB
Step by step
How to extract text from a PDF
Step 1: Drop a PDF on the box above, or select Choose file.
Step 2: Leave the pages empty for the whole document, or pick the pages you need. Choose whether to label each page.
Step 3: Select Extract text, read the start of it on the page, then Download the .txt file.
What you get
The text of each page, in reading order, as a plain UTF-8 text file: lines are kept together, and a bigger gap between lines starts a new paragraph. Turn on page headings to see where each page begins. The result card shows the start of the text and the word count.
Only the text the PDF actually holds is extracted. Layout such as tables and columns comes out as lines in page order, and pictures are skipped.
Choosing pages
Click page thumbnails, or type a range such as 1-3, 5, to extract only those pages; with none chosen, the whole document is read. Long documents take a few seconds, and the progress shows which page is being read. If you only need part of a PDF as a new PDF, use Extract PDF pages.
Scanned PDFs
A scanned PDF is a picture of each page, with no text inside, so there is nothing to extract and you are told so. Text recognition (OCR) for scans is planned. Need the text with headings and lists kept? Use PDF to Markdown.
Private
The text is read inside your browser tab. Your PDF is never uploaded.
How it works in your browser
FileConvertify extracts text using Mozilla's pdf.js library running directly inside your browser. The engine parses the PDF's binary cross-reference table, unpacks page content streams using FlateDecode decompression, and iterates through individual text showing operators (such as Tj and TJ).
By inspecting character coordinates, font metrics, and transformation matrices on the page, the tool reconstructs words and paragraphs in natural reading order while discarding presentation glyphs. In a scanned document, however, the content stream contains only image XObjects (raster pictures of paper) rather than text operator streams—which is why the tool cleanly detects when a page has no digital text to extract, saving you time without running unnecessary processing.