How PDF to Text Works
The tool reads the PDF's internal content streams — the parts that describe what text gets drawn on each page — and pulls the text out directly. If a stream is compressed (the most common case for PDFs made by everyday software), it's decompressed using your browser's built-in Compression Streams API before extracting the text.
How to Use This Tool
- Choose or drag in a PDF file.
- Wait a moment while it's processed.
- Review the extracted text, then copy it or download it as a .txt file.
Example
A simple one-page PDF report extracts as plain paragraphs matching the original wording, with line breaks roughly following how the text was laid out on the page.
Helpful Tips
- Works best on PDFs generated from text-based documents (word processors, browsers, or this site's own Text to PDF tool) rather than scanned images — scanned pages have no embedded text to extract.
- PDFs using embedded or subset fonts with custom character encodings may extract with some garbled characters, since decoding those requires the font's specific character map.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No, extraction happens entirely in your browser.
Why is some of the extracted text garbled or missing?
This tool reads text directly from the PDF's content streams without a full PDF-parsing engine. Standard fonts extract cleanly; PDFs with embedded custom fonts, or scanned image-only pages, may extract incompletely.
Does this work on scanned documents?
No — a scanned PDF is really just images of pages, with no underlying text to extract. You'd need OCR (optical character recognition) software for that, which this tool doesn't perform.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your input is not uploaded to any server.