PDF to text
Extract all the text from a PDF. Free — no signup, no watermarks.
How it works
- 1Open your PDF.
- 2Click Extract. The text layer is read out of the document on your device.
- 3Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
Common questions
›Why did my scanned PDF produce no text?
Scans and photos are pictures of text — there's no text layer inside to extract. Reading those requires OCR (optical character recognition), which is what our OCR API does with LLM-grade accuracy. This free tool handles digital PDFs: exports, invoices, reports, e-books.
›Does the extracted text keep its formatting?
You get the text content in reading order, but PDF is a layout format, not a text format — columns, tables, and fonts don't survive the trip. For clean paragraphs of text it works beautifully.
›Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. This tool runs entirely in your browser — the file is opened, processed, and saved on your own device. There is no upload in the code path, which you can verify by watching the network tab, or by loading the page and then switching to airplane mode: the tool still works.