PDF to Text Free — Extract All Text Content as Plain TXT
Extract all text from PDF files as a plain TXT file. Free PDF to text tool — works on scanned PDFs with OCR. No signup, instant results.
When to Convert PDF to Plain Text
Extracting plain text from PDFs is needed for many workflows:
- Copying document content to paste into Word, Google Docs, or emails
- Feeding PDF content into natural language processing (NLP) pipelines
- Extracting data for database import or spreadsheet analysis
- Indexing PDF content for custom search engines
- Converting PDF reports into editable text files for revision
- Extracting text from contracts or legal documents for keyword search
- Creating plain-text backups of document libraries
- Processing invoices or forms for automated data capture
How to Convert PDF to Text — Step by Step
- Upload Your PDF: Drag and drop your PDF or click to browse. Both native and scanned PDFs are supported.
- Extract Text: Click 'Extract Text'. The tool retrieves all text from the PDF, including headers, body, and footnotes.
- Download TXT File: Download a clean .txt file with all extracted text. Open it in any text editor, import into any application.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does PDF to Text work on scanned PDFs?
For scanned PDFs (image-based), use our OCR PDF tool first to add a text layer, then extract with PDF to Text. Alternatively, PDF to Text attempts basic OCR on scanned pages automatically.
Does the extracted text maintain the original reading order?
For single-column documents, yes. Multi-column layouts may produce text in a different order than the visual reading sequence. For complex layouts, consider extracting by page range.
Can I extract text from specific pages only?
Yes — use the page range selector to extract text from specific pages rather than the entire document.
What encoding is the output TXT file?
UTF-8 encoding, supporting all languages including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and all Latin-extended characters.
Is there a page limit?
No limit. Large PDFs extract in segments and are provided as a single combined .txt file.