PDF to Text Extractor
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Extract all text content from a PDF as a plain .txt or markdown file. Preserves page breaks and structure.
PDF to Text Extractor
Drop a PDF here, or click to browse
PDF files only · up to ~50 MB
About This Tool
What This Tool Does
Pulls the text layer out of any text-based PDF and saves it as plain text. Each page is separated by a clear marker so you can navigate the extracted content easily.What Works Well
- Born-digital PDFs (created from Word, Google Docs, LaTeX, web exports)
- PDFs with embedded text layers (most modern documents)
- Reports, articles, contracts, books
What Doesn't Work
- Scanned PDFs — images of text, not actual text. You'd need OCR (optical character recognition) for those.
- Password-protected PDFs — unlock first with the PDF Unlock tool
- PDFs with custom encoded fonts — text may come out as garbled characters
Output Options
Choose plain text (one line per text run) or markdown-friendly output (paragraphs separated by blank lines, page numbers as headers).Frequently Asked Questions
Why is my extracted text empty?
Your PDF is likely a scan (images of text, no actual text layer). Run it through an OCR tool first — Adobe Acrobat, Tesseract, or Google Drive's built-in OCR — then extract text from the OCR'd version.
Why does spacing or line breaks look weird?
PDFs store text positionally — every word may be at specific coordinates rather than in paragraphs. The tool groups text by Y-coordinate to recover lines, but multi-column layouts, footnotes, and headers can still confuse the order. Manual cleanup is sometimes needed for complex documents.
Can it preserve tables?
Not well. PDF tables are rendered as positioned text without structural cues. Extracting tabular data accurately requires specialized libraries (tabula-py, camelot) or paid services. For simple tables, the column structure may survive enough to recover with find-replace.