PDF to Text
Extract all plain text content from a PDF file.
Choose a file or drag it here
Accepts PDF · Up to 25MB
Encrypted upload · Auto-deleted after 1 hour · PDPA compliant
Extracting plain text from a PDF strips away all formatting, fonts, and layout — leaving raw content that is easy to copy, process, search, or import into other applications. This is particularly useful for feeding PDF content to AI tools, search indexers, and text analysis scripts where markup gets in the way.
When plain text extraction is exactly what you need
Developers building document intelligence tools frequently need raw text to feed into language models, sentiment analysis pipelines, or search indexes — and PDF formatting creates noise. Researchers who have downloaded dozens of academic papers as PDFs use text extraction to run keyword searches across the entire corpus without opening each file. Legal teams performing contract review with AI assistants extract text from case documents for input into Claude or GPT. Students doing document summarisation with AI tools use text extraction to get clean input without table artefacts or header clutter from the PDF.
How to use PDF to Text — step by step
Upload the PDF
Works with digitally created PDFs that have a text layer. Scanned PDFs produce almost no usable text — use OCR PDF first.
Extract text
Click Process File. The text layer is read in reading order and exported to a .txt file.
Use the text file
Open the .txt in any text editor, paste into an AI tool, or import into your data pipeline. Encoding is UTF-8 to support all character sets.
Tips for best results
Multi-column layouts extract in reading order, but columns may interleave — a two-column PDF may produce alternating lines from both columns in the text output.
Footnotes and sidebars may appear mid-document rather than at the position you expect, based on where they are stored in the PDF text layer.
UTF-8 encoding means Arabic, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil scripts extract correctly, provided those fonts are embedded in the source PDF.
Use your OS "Find in Files" feature to search across multiple extracted .txt files from a batch of PDFs.
Frequently Asked Questions
The extracted text looks scrambled — why?
Scrambled text usually means the PDF uses a custom glyph-to-character mapping that our extractor cannot interpret, or the text was stored in a proprietary encoding. This is common with old scanned PDFs or PDFs exported from unusual software. The OCR PDF tool can create a fresh, clean text layer.
Does text extraction preserve paragraph breaks?
Paragraph breaks are approximated from line spacing metadata in the PDF. Results are generally good for single-column documents; narrow columns may lose some paragraph breaks.
Will headers and footers be included in the extracted text?
Yes. Headers, footers, page numbers, and watermarks that are part of the text layer will appear in the output, usually at the top and bottom of each page's text block.
Can I extract text from a PDF form with filled fields?
Yes. Filled form field values are part of the text layer and will be included in the extracted text alongside the label text.
Why does the .txt file show boxes or question marks for some characters?
This occurs when a non-standard font without proper Unicode mapping is embedded in the PDF. Open the .txt in a UTF-8-aware text editor like VS Code or Notepad++ to rule out encoding display issues first.
Free
Always free
0
Accounts needed
1hr
File retention
SSL
Encrypted