PDF to Text — Free, in Your Browser
The most common PDF job is the most sensitive one: you want the *words*, not the file.
PDF to Text
Extract text — 100% local
Why convert PDF to Text
The most common PDF job is the most sensitive one: you want the *words*, not the file. Editing a contract clause, feeding a report to an editor, quoting a paragraph, building data for a spreadsheet — all of it starts with getting the text out without emailing a possibly-confidential document to a stranger's extraction service.
This tool reads the real text layer with the same PDF.js engine Firefox ships — no OCR guessing, no queue, no "files deleted after 1 hour" promise you have to trust. Scanned PDFs (images of pages) have no text layer to read; those need OCR, which is where the upload-based services live, and we deliberately stay out of that business.
How to do it (3 steps)
- Open or drop your PDF — parsed locally.
- The text is extracted page by page with page markers.
- Copy what you need, or download the full text.
Technical note
Extraction follows the PDF's internal text order, which is correct for the vast majority of documents but can get jumbled in complex multi-column layouts (newspaper-style pages). If a column jumps around, the underlying PDF was built that way — re-flow it in an editor rather than trusting any extractor, because they all see the same internal order.
The mistake worth avoiding
The common mistake is expecting paragraph-perfect output from a PDF that was laid out as a design object rather than as text — multi-column reports, text wrapped around images, pages built from absolutely-positioned boxes. The extractor reads the text in the PDF's internal storage order, which for those layouts is a scrambled version of the visual reading order. Single-column documents — contracts, letters, most exports — come out clean. If yours does not, the problem is the source layout, and no extractor fixes it without OCR.
FAQ
- Is my PDF uploaded? No — the document is parsed in your browser. You can verify by running it with Wi-Fi off.
- Does it work on scanned PDFs? Only if the scan has an OCR text layer. Pure image pages have no text to extract, and we do not run OCR — there is no server to run it on.
- What about watermarks or headers repeated on every page? They come out as text too, since they are part of the page's text layer. Delete them in your editor after copying.
- Will tables come out as tables? No — table cells come out as their cell texts in storage order, separated by whitespace. For structured data you need grid parsing; this tool gives you the raw text, which is the right starting point for most copy-paste jobs.
PDF to Text tool — full tool →