PDF to TXT
Extract all readable text from your PDF.
or click to browse — supports PDF files up to 100MB
How to use
- 1 Drop or click to upload your file
- 2 Adjust options if shown
- 3 Click Run Tool
- 4 Download your result instantly
- ✓ Files up to 1GB
- ✓ Unlimited jobs/hour
- ✓ Batch processing
- ✓ Priority support
Files are processed securely and permanently deleted within 1 hour. We never store, read, or share your documents.
Why this works
Extract all the text content from a PDF as a plain-text (.txt) file \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019s preserved in the text output: words, sentences, paragraph breaks (as double newlines), basic line breaks within paragraphs, special characters and accents. What\u2019s 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 \u2014 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\u2019t support UTF-8.
For structured tabular data, PDF to Excel is the right tool \u2014 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 2\u20134 seconds; scanned PDFs take 1\u20133 seconds per page because each page is OCR\u2019d.
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3Download the .txtYou\u2019ll 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 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.