Free PDF to Text Converter
Copying text out of a PDF should not be this hard
You select a paragraph in a PDF, paste it into a document, and get broken lines, missing spaces or strange symbols. Or you cannot select anything at all. This converter reads the text layer of the PDF page by page, puts the lines and words back together, and gives you plain text you can copy or save as a .txt file, with a word and character count. It works in your browser and does not upload your file.
The text layer: the one thing that decides everything
A PDF either contains real text or it does not. A PDF exported from Word, Google Docs, a web page or most software contains letters with positions, a text layer, and extraction works well. A scanned PDF, or a photo saved as a PDF, contains only a picture of a page. There is no text inside to extract, however clear the picture looks.
The quickest test is to try selecting a word in your PDF reader. If you can highlight it, there is a text layer. If clicking selects a whole block like an image, there is not, and you need OCR, which means optical character recognition software that reads the picture and writes out the letters. The tool tells you plainly when it finds no text.
What the output looks like, and how to tidy it
Extracted text keeps line breaks the way the PDF laid them out, so every line of a paragraph ends with a break. Pasting that into a word processor can look odd until you join the lines of each paragraph. Other things to expect:
- Columns. Text from two-column layouts is read in page order, so check that the columns did not get mixed.
- Headers, footers and page numbers are included on every page. Turning on page markers makes them easier to spot and delete.
- Hyphenated words split across lines stay split as in the PDF.
- Tables become lines of text without grid lines, so columns may need arranging by hand.
When the text comes out as gibberish
Occasionally a PDF has a perfectly good text layer, and yet the extracted words are nonsense, or characters are replaced by squares and odd symbols. This happens when the PDF uses a custom font encoding, which makes the letters look right on screen but stores them under the wrong codes. It is common in older documents and in some languages, including Bengali and other scripts. There is no reliable fix in a browser tool. The practical options are to run OCR on the pages, or to ask whoever made the PDF for the original source document.
Good uses for extracted text
- Quote a paragraph from a report without retyping it.
- Paste a document into a translation tool, or an AI assistant for summarising, such as the AI text summarizer.
- Search a long PDF with a text editor’s find feature.
- Check an essay’s length with the word counter.
- Compare two versions of a contract with the text diff checker.
A quick clean-up recipe for pasted text
- Turn on page markers if you want to find the page breaks, and delete the marker lines when you no longer need them.
- Paste the text into your word processor.
- Remove repeated headers and footers, by searching for a distinctive word from them.
- Join the broken lines inside paragraphs. Most word processors can replace line breaks with spaces, as long as you protect real paragraph breaks first.
- Fix hyphenated words that were split across lines.
A few minutes of this turns raw extraction into clean text, and still beats retyping a whole document.
Copyright and privacy
Extracting text is a technical step, not a licence. Quoting short passages with credit is normal, but copying a whole book or article is not yours to do just because you can. On privacy, the tool reads the PDF inside your browser, so contracts, statements and personal documents are not sent to a server. If you paste the extracted text into an online AI tool afterwards, that tool has its own rules, so remove sensitive details first.
FAQ
Drop the PDF above. The text appears in a box where you can copy it or download it as a .txt file.
Your PDF is most likely a scan or a photo of a page with no text layer. It needs OCR software.
It keeps line breaks and paragraph gaps, but not fonts, bold text, columns or tables.
No. Remove the password first.
No. Everything happens in your browser.
Not directly. A scan is a picture with no text in it, so it needs OCR software to read the letters.
Yes. After extraction, the tool shows the page count, word count and character count of the text.
Yes. After extraction, the tool shows the page count, word count and character count of the text.