CloudConverter
PDF to TXTCopying text out of a PDF by hand is painful: line breaks land in the middle of sentences, columns get mixed up and long documents take forever. This tool pulls all the text out of a PDF in one go and saves it as a plain .txt file, page by page in reading order, ready to paste into an email, a document, a translation tool or an AI assistant.
What gets extracted
All selectable text in the PDF, in any language, saved as UTF-8 so Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese and accented letters stay intact. Text is sorted in reading order (top to bottom, left to right), and pages are separated by a blank line.
Formatting, images and tables do not exist in plain text. Table cells come out as lines of text. If you need the layout too, use PDF to Word instead.
Scanned PDFs
A scanned PDF is made of photos of pages and contains no real text, so the TXT file would be empty. The tool tells you when this happens; use Image to Text (OCR) on the pages to recognise the words instead.
Where this comes in handy
AI and translation
Paste a whole PDF’s text into ChatGPT, Google Translate or a summariser.
Research
Collect quotes and passages from papers and e-books.
Data clean-up
Get raw text out of statements and reports for processing.
Accessibility
Read documents with screen readers or text-to-speech apps.
Frequently asked questions
How do I extract text from a PDF?
Upload the PDF here and press Extract. Download a .txt file with all of its text.
Does it keep formatting?
No, plain text has no formatting. Use PDF to Word if you need fonts, tables and layout.
Why is my text file empty?
The PDF is probably scanned, so it holds images instead of text. Use Image to Text (OCR) instead.
Which languages work?
All of them. The file is saved as UTF-8, so every script is kept.
Are my files kept?
No. Each PDF is processed in a private temporary folder that is deleted right afterwards.
PDF to Word
PDF to JPG
PDF to PNG
PDF to PPT
PDF to TIFF
PDF to BMP
JPG to PDF
Compress PDF
Merge PDF