Convert PDF to TXT in Your Browser
Extract the text from a PDF and download it as a .txt file, entirely in your browser. Your PDF never leaves your device, and the extraction keeps working offline.
Drag and drop or Tap to select a PDFclick to select a PDF
Files are processed on your device only.
How it works
- Drop or select your .pdf file. It is read on your device only.
- The text layer is extracted and shown in a preview.
- Click Download to save it as a .txt file.
How text-layer extraction works
A text-based PDF stores the actual characters of each page along with their positions, which is why you can select and copy text in a PDF viewer. This tool reads that stored text with a local PDF engine, walks the pages in order, and reconstructs lines from the character runs, then hands you the plain text.
Because it reads what the file already contains, extraction is exact for the characters that are there: no guessing, no re-typing. To go the other way and turn text into a PDF, the TXT to PDF converter does that. See how browser-side rendering works.
Text layer vs OCR: why scanned PDFs are not supported
There are two kinds of PDF. A born-digital PDF, exported from an editor or a browser, has a text layer. A scanned PDF is a photograph of paper wrapped in a PDF container: to a computer it is an image with no characters inside, so there is literally nothing to extract.
Pulling text out of an image requires OCR (optical character recognition), which recognizes shapes as letters and can make mistakes. This tool deliberately does not do OCR, so it never invents text that was not in the file. If your PDF is a scan, run it through an OCR step first, then extract the resulting searchable PDF here.
Frequently asked questions
- Does this work on scanned PDFs or photographed pages?
- No. It reads the text layer a PDF stores, so a scan, which is really a picture of a page, has nothing to extract and comes back empty with a notice. Run such files through an OCR tool first, then extract text from the searchable PDF it produces.
- What is preserved in the .txt output?
- The words, their reading order, line breaks, and page order are kept, with a blank line between pages. Visual layout such as columns, tables, and exact spacing is not reconstructed, because a .txt file has no way to represent it.
- Do accented and non-Latin characters come through?
- Yes, when the PDF stores proper character codes. The extracted text is Unicode, so accents and non-Latin scripts are preserved. A few PDFs use custom font encodings without real character codes, and those can produce garbled output.
- Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
- No. The file is parsed in your browser on your device using a local PDF engine. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and the extraction keeps working offline.