Extract text from a PDF with this PDF to text converter

To extract text from a PDF, select or drop it on this page, pick All pages or First page only under What to include, and press Convert to TXT. The PDF to text step runs once and gives you a plain .txt file named after your PDF, so report.pdf comes back as report.txt.

Use it as a PDF text extractor when you want the words and not the page: a quote for an email, a long report to search, or text for another program to read. When the conversion is done, the text shows on the page with a Copy text button, so to copy text from the PDF you can paste it straight where you need it. You also get the .txt file, and a text over 100,000 characters is a download only.

Going the other way, convert text to PDF to lay a .txt file out on pages. Other documents turn into plain text here too: convert Word to text, convert RTF to text, convert HTML to text or convert PowerPoint to text.

A scanned PDF is a picture of a page, with no words in it to lift. When a PDF has no text at all, the English words on its pages are read first and go into the .txt file. With First page only, only that page is read.

Reading a scan can get a character wrong, so check names and numbers. In our test of a scanned A4 page, every English word came back right, but the Ø in a name was read as @ and a stray bracket appeared before one number.

To change a PDF to text is to keep the words and leave the page behind. Letters such as é, Ø and £ come through, since the file is saved as UTF-8 (a standard text encoding). Lines break where they broke on the page, so a paragraph comes back as several lines, and each new page starts after a page-break character.

For a table you want to keep as a table, convert PDF to Word instead. When the PDF has real text, its tables come back as Word tables with their cells. Our guide on how to convert a PDF to Word with tables intact shows what can still break and how to fix it. If you only need to convert a PDF to a text file for searching or pasting, the .txt file is the lighter choice.

For a picture rather than a PDF, use Image to Text. It reads the English text in a JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF or SVG and shows it on the page with a Copy text button, or saves it as a .txt file. That suits a screenshot or a photo of one page, when you want the words on screen straight away. To turn a photo of a page into a Word document you can edit, use JPG to Word.