PDF to Text
Extract text from any PDF page by page, with English OCR for scanned pages
Your files are processed in your browser. They are never uploaded, and nothing is stored after you close the page. How we handle privacy
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type or upload is sent to us or stored.
Keep a copy of your original file. Check the result before you use it. Terms of use
How to Use
- Choose or drop your PDF. If it's password-protected, type the password (the eye button shows what you typed) and press Open or Enter.
- The text of every page appears in the box. Use the Show list or the arrows to look at one page at a time, or pick All pages.
- If some pages have no text layer (scans or photos), press Read text with OCR (English). The first time, it downloads about 7 MB from this site, then reads each page and shows its progress.
- To fix a word, pick that page and edit the text in the box. Your changes are kept in the copy and the download.
- Press Copy page, Copy all or Download .txt. Switch off Mark where each page starts if you don't want the "--- Page 1 ---" lines.
Getting plain text out of a PDF
This PDF to text converter pulls the words out of a PDF and gives you plain text you can paste into an email, a WhatsApp message, an Excel sheet or a form. It works page by page, keeps the line breaks of the original, and lets you copy one page or the whole document. Everything happens in your browser. The PDF is not uploaded anywhere.
Plain text is often more useful than a Word file. You may only need the account number and amount from a bank letter, the address block from a notice, or the questions from a scanned exam paper so you can rearrange them.
How the text is put back together
A PDF doesn't store sentences or lines. It stores small pieces of text, each with an exact position on the page. To rebuild readable lines, the tool:
2. Sorts each line from left to right
3. Adds a space for a small gap, and several spaces for a wide gap (table columns)
4. Leaves a blank line where the gap between lines is clearly bigger than usual
So a simple invoice table comes out with its columns spaced apart instead of run together:
Seller: Sharma Traders, Pune
Item Qty Amount
Notebook 10 450.00
Two-column layouts, like a newspaper page, can come out with both columns on the same line, because the pieces really are side by side. Pick the page, fix it in the box, and copy it from there.
Scanned pages and OCR
If a PDF was made by a scanner or a phone camera app, each page is just a picture. There is no text layer to read, so the tool tells you which pages are empty, for example "Pages 3–5 have no text layer".
For those pages you can press Read text with OCR (English). OCR (optical character recognition) looks at the image and works out the letters. The tool draws each page at twice its normal size and runs Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, inside your browser. The engine and the English language data (about 7 MB) load from this website the first time; after that your browser usually keeps them.
| Kind of PDF | What you get |
|---|---|
| Made from Word, Excel, Tally or a bank's website | Exact text, straight away |
| Clear scan of a printed English page | Good OCR text, check numbers and names |
| Phone photo, tilted or in poor light | Partial OCR text with mistakes |
| Handwriting, Hindi or other Indian scripts | Not supported by this English OCR |
OCR makes mistakes. It can read a 0 as an O, a 1 as an l, or drop a ₹ sign. After OCR, the page's text is editable, so read it against the page and correct it before you rely on it, especially for amounts, PAN numbers and dates.
Password-protected PDFs
Many Indian bank statements, credit card bills and salary slips arrive with a password. Enter it when asked and the text is extracted as usual. The password is used only in your browser. If you'd rather have a copy that opens without it, use the Unlock PDF tool first.
Tips
- The download is a UTF-8 .txt file, so Hindi text and the ₹ sign are kept where the PDF had a proper text layer.
- Some PDFs use fonts that don't record which letter each shape stands for. If the text comes out as random symbols, that is what the file holds, and copying from a PDF reader gives the same result.
- Need headings and paragraphs in a Word document instead? Use the PDF to Word tool.
- Large PDFs with hundreds of pages work, but OCR takes a few seconds per page, so run it only on the pages you need.