PDF to TXT
Extract all readable text from your PDF.
or click to browse — supports PDF files up to 25MB
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How to use
- 1 Drop or click to upload your file
- 2 Adjust options if shown
- 3 Click PDF to TXT
- 4 Download your result instantly
- ✓ Files up to 1 GB
- ✓ Unlimited jobs/hour
- ✓ Batch processing (up to 100 files)
- ✓ Priority support
Files are processed securely and deleted within 1 hour. Files are processed automatically. No human reviews your documents, and PDFRun does not use them to train models.
Why this works
Extract all the text content from a PDF as a plain-text (.txt) file — stripped of formatting, fonts and layout. Useful for piping into scripts, search-indexing, text mining, or just grabbing the words for re-use.
PDF to TXT pulls the text content out of a PDF and gives it back as a clean .txt file. Where PDF to Word preserves layout (paragraphs, headings, tables, styling), PDF to TXT discards all of that and returns just the words — a flat stream of text suitable for further processing.
This is the right tool when. Scripting and automation: feeding PDF content into a script, ML pipeline, or data-processing workflow that expects plain text input. Search-indexing: building a custom text index over a PDF library — indexers want raw text, not formatted Word documents. Text mining: extracting raw text for sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, or topic modelling. Quick content recovery: you just need the words from a PDF; layout doesn’t matter.
The converter handles two cases. Born-digital PDFs (PDFs that were exported from Word, Pages, Google Docs, or accounting software) extract cleanly because the text was always present as real text. Expect near-perfect text recovery, including special characters and accented letters. Scanned PDFs (image-only sources) run through OCR first to recognise text in the page images; the OCR text then becomes the .txt output. Accuracy is high for clean modern scans, lower for marginal-quality images.
What’s preserved in the text output: words, sentences, paragraph breaks (as double newlines), basic line breaks within paragraphs, special characters and accents. What’s discarded: fonts, colours, font sizes, bold/italic styling, layout (multi-column flows flatten to single-column), tables (cell content becomes a flat sequence of values, not a structured table), images (not extracted by this tool — use Extract Images for that).
Character encoding: output is UTF-8. Every modern tool reads UTF-8; older Windows tools may need re-saving to Windows-1252 if they don’t support UTF-8.
For structured tabular data, PDF to Excel is the right tool — PDF to TXT will give you the values but lose the table structure. For preserving formatting, PDF to Word. For Markdown, PDF to Markdown.
How it works
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1Upload your PDFDrop the PDF you want as plain text into the upload box. Born-digital and scanned PDFs both work.
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2Run the extractionPress Convert. Born-digital PDFs finish in well under a minute; scanned PDFs take 1–3 seconds per page because each page is OCR’d.
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3Download the .txtYou’ll get a UTF-8-encoded plain-text file with paragraph breaks preserved as double newlines.
Real-world uses
Data scientists
Feed PDF content into NLP pipelines that expect plain text input.
Developers
Extract text from a folder of PDFs to build a custom search index.
Researchers
Pull text from journal-article PDFs for text-mining, citation analysis, or content extraction.
Journalists
Recover words from a leaked PDF for quoting, fact-checking, or republishing.
Common questions
Will the text formatting be preserved?
No — PDF to TXT discards all formatting (fonts, styling, colours, layout). The output is a flat stream of words. For preserved formatting, use PDF to Word; for Markdown, PDF to Markdown.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
Yes. Scanned PDFs run through OCR first — the recognised text becomes the .txt output. Accuracy depends on scan quality (99%+ on clean modern scans, lower on marginal-quality images).
What about tables in the PDF?
Table cell content extracts as a flat sequence of values — row by row, cell by cell, separated by spaces. Table structure (which value belongs to which row/column) is lost. For preserving table structure, use PDF to Excel.
What encoding does the output use?
UTF-8 — the modern standard, supports every language and character. If your downstream tool only reads Latin-1 or Windows-1252, open the .txt in any modern text editor and re-save in the encoding you need.
Will paragraph breaks be preserved?
Yes. Paragraph breaks in the source render as double newlines in the .txt (one blank line between paragraphs); line breaks within paragraphs render as single newlines.
Can I extract text from specific pages only?
Use Extract Pages first to pull just those pages, then run PDF to TXT on the smaller PDF.