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PDF to Text

Plain .txt with no formatting at all. Free, no sign-up.

Converting PDF to text extracts the words page by page into a plain .txt file, with no headings, no page rules and no Markdown syntax of any kind. A scan produces nothing, because there is no text layer to read. It is free and runs entirely in your browser.

or drop it here

PDF to Text runs inside your browser — your file never reaches our servers.

How to extract text from a PDF

The words are extracted page by page into one plain text file. No headings, no rules, no syntax — just the text, which is exactly what a script or a search index wants.

Select your PDF. Click the button or drag the file onto the page. It stays on your computer.
Decide how pages are separated. Leave the tick-box on to put a blank line between pages, or turn it off for one continuous run of text.
Convert and download. A single .txt file, named after the document. The line under the result tells you how many characters came out.

Plain text, and why the absence of syntax is the point

What comes out is the words, separated by newlines, with a blank line between pages if you leave the tick-box on. No document heading, no horizontal rules, no page-break comments, no asterisks, no syntax of any kind. That sounds like a smaller version of PDF to Markdown, and it is exactly the opposite of one: Markdown adds structure that is useful in Obsidian and noise in a word counter, a diff, a search index or a model context window. Stripping it afterwards is a step, and this page is that step removed.

Extraction happens page by page and the pieces are joined in page order, with runs of blank lines collapsed so the file does not arrive full of gaps. The result line under the download tells you the page count and the character count, which is the quickest sanity check there is: a fifty-page report that produces two hundred characters has told you something before you have opened the file.

A scan gives you nothing, and that is not a bug

The single most common surprise here is an empty or near-empty file. Almost always the PDF is a scan — a photograph of a page, with no text layer underneath it. There is nothing to extract, so nothing comes out, and the result line says so rather than handing you a silent empty download. The fix is OCR PDF: it recognises the words in the image and writes an invisible text layer into the file, after which this page has something to read.

You can tell before you start. Open the PDF and try to select a word by dragging across it. If the selection highlights the word, there is a text layer and extraction will work. If the drag draws a rectangle over the page instead, it is a picture and you need recognition first. That thirty-second check also saves you running OCR on a file that never needed it, which would trade a crisp vector page for a re-encoded image for no gain.

Reading order, and the layouts that break it

A PDF does not store paragraphs. It stores instructions for drawing runs of glyphs at coordinates, and extraction follows the order those instructions appear in the content stream. For a single-column document that order is the reading order and the output is clean. For a two-column journal article, a newsletter with a sidebar, or a page with text inside figures, it very often is not: columns interleave line by line, captions land in the middle of paragraphs, and a header repeats every page.

Nothing here reconstructs layout, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong kind of clever — a heuristic that is right most of the time produces errors you cannot see. If reading order matters and the layout is complex, PDF to Word does attempt structural reconstruction and gives you something you can inspect and fix. Two smaller quirks worth knowing: a word broken across two lines keeps its hyphen, because the hyphen belongs to the page rather than the word, and ligatures may come out as the single character the font used rather than the two letters you expect.

PDF to Text: common questions

How is this different from PDF to Markdown?

This gives you the words and nothing else. PDF to Markdown adds a heading for the document and, optionally, a horizontal rule and an HTML comment at each page break — useful in a note system, and noise everywhere else. If your next step is a script, a word count, a search index or a model context window, the plain file is the one you want.

I got an empty file. What happened?

Your PDF is almost certainly a scan: a picture of a page with no text layer underneath, so there is nothing to extract. Run OCR PDF over it first — that recognises the words and writes an invisible text layer into the file — and then come back here. The result line says so explicitly when no text comes out.

Why is the text out of order in places?

Extraction follows the order the words are written in the PDF content stream, which is usually the order you read them but does not have to be. Two-column layouts, sidebars and text in figures are where it goes wrong, because the writing order was never the reading order. A single-column report comes out clean.

Why do some words have a hyphen and a space in the middle?

The PDF broke that word across two lines, and the hyphen belongs to the page rather than the word. Extraction joins the pieces with a space, so the hyphenated break survives as one. A careful find-and-replace clears them, and language models read straight through them.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. Every tool on this site runs inside your browser, using the same engine as the Folia desktop app. Your file is read from your disk into your browser’s memory, processed there, and handed back as a download. It never crosses the internet, so there is nothing for us to store, leak or hand over.

Is there a file size limit?

We impose none. The only ceiling is your own device’s memory, which differs from one computer to another — so we read what your browser reports about this machine and show the resulting limit on the page. Light tools like merge and rotate handle far more than heavy ones like OCR, which must render every page. For anything larger, Folia for Desktop has no limit at all.

Is it really free? Do I need an account?

Yes, and no. Every tool is free and unlimited, with no watermark and no sign-up. Ads pay for the site, and your own computer does the work, which costs us nothing. Signing in with a paid Folia plan simply removes the ads.