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PDF to Text

Extract the text layer of a PDF, optionally preserving the page layout.

Large documents can take up to a minute. You can keep this tab open in the background.

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About PDF to Text

Pull all text out of a PDF for search, quoting or further processing. Layout mode keeps columns and tables aligned with spaces; reading mode produces flowing text. Scanned PDFs have no text layer — use OCR for those.

How it works

  1. 1

    Drop a PDF.

  2. 2

    Choose whether to preserve the layout.

  3. 3

    Download the .txt file.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the result empty?

The PDF is probably a scan (an image of text). Use the OCR tool to recognise text in scanned documents.

Is the text encoding UTF-8?

Yes. Accented and non-Latin characters are preserved as long as the PDF contains proper font mappings.