Copying text out of a PDF viewer is often a mess: columns run together, selections jump around, and selecting fifty pages by hand is tedious. This tool reads the text layer of a PDF and writes it to a plain UTF-8 .txt file, page by page, in one step.
Plain text is the right format when layout does not matter: quoting, searching, counting words, pasting into a chat or an AI assistant, or loading into a script or spreadsheet. The extraction runs in your browser with PDF.js, so confidential documents are never uploaded. If you would rather have an editable document with headings, PDF to Word is the better fit.
What text extraction can and cannot read
A PDF made by a word processor, a browser's print dialog or most publishing software contains real text: characters with positions and font sizes. The tool collects those characters, rebuilds lines from their positions on the page and leaves a blank line where the spacing shows a new paragraph. Each line of the PDF stays on its own line in the text file, which keeps lists, addresses and columns of figures readable.
A scanned page is different. It is a photograph of paper with no characters inside. When a PDF has no selectable text at all, the tool says so with a clear message that it may be a scanned document, rather than handing you an empty file. It does not perform OCR (optical character recognition), so a scan needs an OCR program before its words can be extracted.
Uses for extracted PDF text
Quoting and searching long documents
Research papers, policies and manuals are faster to work with as text. Search them in any editor, copy passages without fighting the viewer's selection, or check what changed between two versions with Text Compare.
Word counts and translation quotes
Translators and editors usually price work per word. Extract the text, paste it into Word Counter and you have a figure without retyping anything or opening a heavy office suite.
Feeding scripts, spreadsheets and AI tools
Data pipelines, search indexes and chat assistants all handle plain text best. A .txt file is the most portable input there is and avoids PDF parsing problems further down the line.
Page separators and output
Page separators is on by default. It writes a marker line such as --- Page 3 --- before each page's text, which makes it easy to cite page numbers or find where a passage came from. Switch it off for one continuous text, with a blank line between pages and empty pages left out.
The output is UTF-8 plain text named after the PDF with a .txt extension, so accented letters and non-Latin scripts are stored correctly as long as the PDF maps its fonts to Unicode. Lines are kept as the PDF lays them out; if you prefer flowing paragraphs, Remove Line Breaks can join them afterwards. Several PDFs can be added at once, and each one produces its own text file.
Come usare questo strumento
- Drop one or more PDFs on the box above, or click Choose files (up to 200 MB each).
- Leave Page separators on to mark where each page begins, or switch it off for continuous text.
- Press Convert.
- Download the .txt file, or use Download all (.zip) if you converted several PDFs.
Limitations
- No OCR: scanned PDFs and photographed documents produce a no-selectable-text error instead of text.
- Formatting, images and links are dropped. A table row usually comes out as one line, with its cells separated by spaces.
- Multi-column layouts are read in the order the PDF stores them, so columns can occasionally interleave.
- Some PDFs use fonts without a Unicode map, which turns the extracted text into odd symbols even though the page looks fine on screen.
- Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened.