Extract text from PDF files. Convert PDF to plain text for editing, analysis & accessibility. Free online converter with OCR.
Upload your .pdf file by dragging it into the upload area or clicking to browse.
Choose your output settings. The default settings work great for most files.
Click Convert and download your .txt file when it's ready.
Extracting text from PDF creates plain text files for editing, searching, analysis, and accessibility. Our PDF to text converter handles both native PDFs (with selectable text) and scanned documents (using OCR), delivering clean text output from any PDF source.
Whether you need to edit PDF content, analyze document text, or make documents accessible to screen readers, text extraction is the essential first step. The conversion produces clean, properly formatted text ready for any text-based workflow.
Text manipulation requires plain text format. PDF content can't be easily edited, searched, or analyzed in its original form. Extracting to text enables find-and-replace, data extraction, content repurposing, and integration with text processing tools.
Accessibility improves with plain text. Screen readers handle plain text more reliably than PDF. For visually impaired users or text-to-speech applications, text extraction enables document access.
Data analysis often begins with text extraction. Natural language processing, content analysis, and data mining tools work with text files. Converting PDF reports, research papers, and documents to text enables programmatic analysis.
For native PDFs (containing actual text, not images), we extract text directly from the PDF structure, preserving character accuracy. Layout approximation attempts to maintain paragraph structure and reading order.
For scanned PDFs (image-based), we apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition) using Tesseract engine. OCR accuracy depends on scan quality—clear, high-resolution scans produce better results. Multiple language support is available.
Native PDF text extraction is highly accurate. OCR accuracy for scanned documents varies based on image quality, font clarity, and language complexity. Handwritten text has lower accuracy than printed text.
| Device | TXT | |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Native | Native |
| macOS | Native | Native |
| iOS | Native | Native |
| Android | Native | Native |
| Linux | Native | Native |
| ChromeOS | Native |
| Speed | Near-instant |
| Output size | ~93% smaller (measured 75 KB → 5 KB). |
| Quality | Text layer extracted; images and layout dropped. |
| Engine | Poppler (pdftotext), server-side. |
Measured on our servers, June 2026, on a 2-page PDF.
Unlock your PDF content for editing and analysis. Our converter extracts text from any PDF—native or scanned—creating plain text files ready for any text-based workflow.
Beyond format conversion, our PDF toolkit covers compression, merging, signing, OCR, annotation, watermarking, PDF/A conversion, and 10 more utilities.
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| Native |
Alle nettlesere, alle enheter
| Egenskap | TXT | |
|---|---|---|
| Fullt navn | Portable Document Format | Plain Text |
| Filendelse | .txt | |
| Best egnet for | Universal format | Universal |