PDF to Text Converter

Copying text out of a PDF often breaks lines in odd places or misses whole pages. This converter reads the text layer of each page, rebuilds the lines in reading order and gives you clean plain text to copy, or a .txt file to save. Scanned pages without a text layer can be read with optical character recognition. All of it runs in your browser, so contracts and reports are never uploaded.

How to use this tool

1. Choose one or more PDF files and, if you like, the pages to read.
2. Keep page markers on to see where each page starts, and tick “Join wrapped lines” if you will paste the text into a document.
3. For scanned PDFs, tick OCR and choose the language of the document.
4. Copy the text from the box or download the .txt file.

Formula

Text pieces on the same baseline (vertical offset under half the font size) form one line; a horizontal gap wider than ¼ of the font size becomes a space; a vertical gap over 1.8 line heights starts a new paragraph.

“Join wrapped lines” merges lines within a paragraph with a space, removes end-of-line hyphens before lower-case words, and joins Chinese and Japanese lines without a space. The .txt file is UTF-8 with Windows line endings so Notepad shows it correctly.

Example

A 3-page PDF where each page says “Page 1”, “Page 2”, “Page 3” gives 6 words and 18 characters. With page markers the text starts “--- Page 1 ---” followed by “Page 1”; without them the three pages are separated by blank lines.

Text layer versus scanned pages

PDFs made from Word, browsers or accounting software contain real text, which is extracted exactly. A scan is a picture of paper: it has no text until OCR recognises the letters. OCR downloads its engine and language data the first time (about 10–20 MB), takes a few seconds per page, and can misread small print — always check names and figures. For a searchable PDF instead of plain text, use OCR PDF.