PDF to Text (TXT)
Pull the writing out of a PDF as a plain text file
Your files stay with you. Conversion happens inside the browser; no file is ever uploaded to a server.
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How it works
Choose your PDF files in the box (tap or click), set the two switches and press Convert to text. The first switch is the page marker: leave it on and a line such as "--- Page 2 ---" appears before every new page, so in a long document you can still see which sentence came from where; turn it off and the writing runs on without interruption. The second switch is about line endings: inside a PDF the lines are already broken to fit the paper width, and carrying those breaks over turns your text into a narrow column in any other program. "Join into paragraphs" gathers continuation lines back together, while "Keep as on the page" is the right choice for poetry, tabular listings and code, where the alignment carries meaning. The result line tells you how many pages were read and how many words came out. You can pick several PDFs at once; each one arrives as its own .txt file under its own name. If a document asks for a password, type it into the field below; leaving that field empty is normal for ordinary files.
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What is Text layer?
The text layer is the part of a PDF where letters really are stored as letters: each character is recorded with its font and its position on the page, and that is what makes the writing selectable, searchable and copyable. Every PDF produced by a word processor, a spreadsheet or an accounting program carries this layer. A page that came out of a scanner does not have one; there is only a photograph there, and what looks like a letter is in fact a group of dark pixels. The text layer is exactly what this tool reads.
What is Scanned PDF?
A scanned PDF is a paper document photographed by a scanner or a phone camera and placed into a PDF page by page. From the outside it looks like an ordinary file, but there is not one selectable letter inside it: if dragging the mouse across the writing selects nothing, what you have is a scan. The only way to get text out of such a file is optical character recognition, a program that guesses letters from the shapes in the picture — and its output always has to be checked by eye.
What is TXT (plain text)?
TXT is the barest document format there is: it holds characters and line breaks and nothing else — no bold, no fonts, no colour, no tables, no pictures. That bareness is why it opens everywhere; text editors, spreadsheet programs, translation tools and screen readers all get along with plain text. The file's encoding decides which characters show up correctly, and this tool writes UTF-8, so accented and non-Latin letters open unchanged in any modern program.
What is the difference between PDF and TXT?
A PDF fixes what the page looks like: fonts, margins, columns and pictures stay in the same place on every device, because the file records that a given letter is to be printed at a given point at a given size. TXT stores no appearance at all, only the sequence of characters; the program that opens it picks the font and the line width itself. Going from PDF to TXT is therefore a lossy direction: table rules, alignment, page layout and images are left behind, and what remains is the writing that carries the meaning. Keep the PDF when the document has to be passed on as it is, and take the TXT when you intend to work on the words.
How are word gaps and columns worked out?
There are no sentences inside a PDF; there are letters placed one by one at fixed points on the page. That is why a raw extraction often produces oddities such as "JohnSmith" or "T otal". This tool looks at the coordinates instead: pieces sitting at the same height form one line, and when the horizontal gap between two pieces is wider than a fifth of the letter height, a word space is inserted. The result is cleaner than what a copy and paste usually gives you.
Two-column typesetting has a limit. Lines are read from left to right, so sentences from side-by-side columns can end up interleaved. In such a document it is quicker to pick "Keep as on the page" and separate the columns by eye. Running heads, footers and page numbers are part of the page as well, so they land in the output too; if you do not want them, delete them in a text editor afterwards.
What is this conversion used for?
The point is to make the writing inside a locked-looking document workable again. The usual jobs are these:
- Searching inside a long report, or carrying a quotation into your notes
- Feeding a document that arrived by e-mail to a translation program or a spell checker
- Looking at the raw listing of an invoice or a statement before moving it into a spreadsheet
- Handing the writing to a text-to-speech program — every reader handles plain text
- Scanned documents will not work: the pages are photographs, so OCR comes first
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert a PDF to text?
Choose the file in the box, set the page marker and line ending switches and press Convert to text. The writing is pulled out and a .txt file arrives, which every text program including Notepad can open.
Why are page numbers and headings in my text?
A running head, a footer and a page number are pieces of writing placed on the page like any other, and the tool takes whatever is on the page. Documents rarely record which part is body and which part is decoration. Deleting them in the output file is the safest route.
Why can a scanned PDF not be converted?
A page that came from a scanner or a phone camera sits inside the PDF as a photograph; the letters are dots, not writing. This tool does not recognise letters in a picture, and it says "no text layer" when it meets such a file.
Do accented and non-English letters survive?
Yes. Whatever encoding the embedded font uses, the tool reads the font's own character mapping and puts the right letters back, so accents, umlauts and Turkish characters come through. Very old or badly embedded fonts can drop the odd letter, so give the output one read.
Is my document uploaded to a server?
No. Opening the file, pulling out the writing and preparing the .txt all happen inside your browser; neither the document nor its name goes anywhere. With contracts and medical reports that difference matters.