PDF to Text Converter — Free & Online
Extract plain text from any PDF instantly in your browser. No upload, no sign-up, no limits.
Why extract PDF text here?
Clean plain text from the PDF's own text layer, produced on your device.
100% Private
The PDF is parsed in your browser by pdf.js. Contracts, medical records and internal reports are never transmitted anywhere.
Header and Footer Removal
An optional pass detects lines that repeat at the top or bottom of most pages — running titles, page numbers — and strips them.
No Page Limit
Thousand-page documents work the same as one-page ones. There is no quota, because there is no server paying per page.
Copy or Download
Preview the result, copy it to the clipboard, or save it as a .txt file.
How to convert PDF to text online
Three steps and a few seconds.
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1
Select your PDF
Drag and drop the file or browse your device. Any size, any page count.
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2
Extract text instantly
The converter reads the text layer page by page — entirely on your device.
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3
Copy or download
Copy the plain text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file.
Need structure rather than flat text? Convert PDF to Markdown to keep headings and lists, or export PDF to JSON for a machine-readable version.
What "extracting text" from a PDF really means
A PDF is not a text file with decoration. It is a set of drawing instructions: place this glyph at this coordinate, in this font, at this size. There is usually no stored notion of a paragraph, a column, or even a word — just positioned characters. Extraction is the job of reading those instructions back and reconstructing the reading order.
This tool uses pdf.js, the same engine Firefox uses to display PDFs, so what you get is the text the document genuinely contains rather than a guess. Lines are assembled from their character positions and emitted in order, page by page.
It also explains the classic surprises. Two-column academic papers can interleave if the columns are drawn in an unexpected order. Ligatures such as "fi" may extract as a single character. Hyphenated line breaks stay hyphenated, because the hyphen is genuinely in the file. None of these are bugs in the extractor — they are what the PDF actually says.
Scanned PDFs, and why they come out empty
If your output is blank, the PDF almost certainly has no text layer. Scanners and photo-to-PDF apps produce exactly this: each page is one large image, and the characters you can see are pixels, not glyphs. There is nothing for any extractor to read.
The fix is OCR — optical character recognition — which looks at the image and infers characters from their shapes. Run the file through an OCR step first, then extract here. A quick way to tell in advance: open the PDF in any viewer and try to select a line of text with your cursor. If nothing highlights, it is a scan.
Some PDFs are hybrids, where a scan has an invisible OCR text layer already added behind the image. Those extract fine, and the accuracy you get is the accuracy whoever ran the OCR got.
Plain text, Markdown, or JSON?
Plain text is the right choice when structure is noise: pasting into a search index, counting words, diffing two revisions, or feeding a script that only cares about the words. It is the smallest, most portable output.
Markdown is better when the document's shape carries meaning — headings, sections, lists. Our PDF to Markdown converter preserves that hierarchy, which matters when a person will read the result or when an LLM needs to understand how a document is organised.
JSON is for programs. PDF to JSON gives every line a type, a font size and a position, which is what you want for chunking documents for retrieval, rebuilding a table of contents, or any pipeline that has to make decisions per line. Because there is no server round trip, the tools keep working with the network disconnected. Load the page, turn off Wi-Fi, and the conversion still runs — which is the most direct proof available that nothing is being uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert a PDF to text?
Drop your PDF into the box above. The text is extracted instantly in your browser — preview it, copy it, or download it as a .txt file. No installation and no account needed.
Is this PDF to text converter free?
Yes, with no page limit. pdf.js runs in your browser, not on a server billed per document, so there is nothing that needs a paywall.
Does the PDF get sent anywhere to extract the text?
No. pdf.js opens and reads the file entirely inside the tab you have open, the same engine Firefox uses to display PDFs. There is no upload step to skip — the file simply never leaves your machine, which is why contracts and medical records are safe to drop in here.
What is the difference between PDF to text and PDF to Markdown?
PDF to text gives you plain, unformatted text — ideal for copy-pasting, search indexing, or feeding simple pipelines. PDF to Markdown preserves structure like headings and lists, which is better for notes, documentation, and LLM prompts.
Why is the output empty for my PDF?
Your PDF is likely a scanned document — images of pages without a text layer. You need OCR (optical character recognition) to turn the images into text first.
How can I tell whether my PDF is scanned?
Open it in any PDF viewer and try to select a line of text with your cursor. If nothing highlights, the page is an image and you will need OCR before extraction will return anything.
Why is the text order wrong on some pages?
Reading order comes from the coordinates of the characters in the file. Multi-column layouts, sidebars and text boxes can therefore interleave if the PDF draws them in an unexpected sequence. Single-column documents extract in the expected order.
Can I remove repeating headers and footers?
Yes — tick the "Remove repeating headers/footers" option before converting. The tool detects lines that repeat at the top or bottom of most pages (like document titles and page numbers) and strips them automatically.