PDF to Text

Convert PDF to text online without installing anything

You have a PDF and need the words out of it, not the layout. Maybe you are feeding a report into a script, pasting a contract clause into an email, or searching a document because your PDF viewer keeps stalling. PDF to Text strips away columns, fonts, and page furniture and hands you the raw wording.

Upload one PDF at a time and the file goes to our servers over an encrypted connection, where the text is pulled out and deleted again within an hour. What comes back is a plain, unformatted file: no bold, no tables, no images, just the characters in reading order. There are no extra settings to fuss over, so you get a result the moment the upload finishes.

Plain text conversion works cleanly on PDFs that already contain real, selectable text. If your file is a scanned photo or a flattened image with no underlying text layer, the tool has nothing to extract and will tell you so instead of returning a file, so check that you can select text in the original PDF first. If you need the layout kept intact, look at PDF to HTML instead. If you want the words to keep some structure, like headings, PDF to Markdown fits better than raw text.

This tool works the same on a laptop or a phone, in any modern browser, with nothing to install.