Convert PDF to text in seconds with this free browser-based tool that strips formatting and delivers raw, selectable content from any PDF. Ideal for indexing, data processing, or quick copy-paste needs, the tool requires no account and processes files locally in your browser. Download the result as a plain text file or copy it directly from the output field.
PDF to Text is a free browser-based tool that extracts all readable text content from a PDF file and displays it as plain text that can be copied or downloaded. This is useful for extracting text for further processing: feeding it into a language model, importing it into a spreadsheet, searching for specific content across a large document, creating a plain-text backup, or preparing content for translation tools that accept plain text input. The tool reads the embedded text layer from the PDF using pdf-lib and PDF.js, combining text from all pages in sequence. It runs entirely in the browser, so no file is sent to a server. Extraction quality depends on the PDF: text-based PDFs extract cleanly, while scanned PDFs contain only images and produce little or no extractable text. No account or installation is required.
PDF to Text is most effective on PDFs that were created digitally by exporting or printing from a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, or design application. These PDFs embed the actual character data alongside the visual representation, so extraction produces clean, accurate plain text. Scanned PDFs, which are essentially image-only files, do not contain embedded text data. For scanned documents, extracting text requires optical character recognition, which is a different process not handled by this tool. A quick test is to try selecting text in the PDF with a PDF viewer: if text highlights and copies correctly, extraction will work well. Common use cases for extracted plain text include copying the content of a PDF report into a note-taking application, extracting the text of a technical document to search it with custom logic, feeding PDF content into AI summarisation or translation workflows, and creating a searchable plain-text index of a collection of PDF files. The tool processes all pages in sequence and combines the output into a single text block. Because processing happens entirely in the browser with no server upload, the tool is safe to use with confidential documents. It works across all modern browsers on desktop and mobile without installation.