PDF to Text
Get a clean UTF-8 text file with the reading order preserved.
PDF to Text online, free and without limits
Sometimes you want the words and nothing else — to paste into an email, run through a translator, search across hundreds of documents, or feed into a script. This produces a clean UTF-8 text file with the reading order preserved and page breaks marked, with no formatting, no images and no PDF overhead. Because it is UTF-8, accented European characters and Indic scripts come through intact rather than turning into question marks.
How to extract text from a PDF
- 1
Upload the PDF.
- 2
Press PDF to Text.
- 3
Download the .txt file.
- 4
Open it in any editor, or pipe it into whatever needs plain text.
What you get
- UTF-8 output, so accents and non-Latin scripts survive.
- Reading order preserved, with pages separated.
- Tiny files that are easy to search, diff or process in bulk.
- Works with any PDF that has a real text layer.
Questions about PDF to Text
What people usually want to know before they upload a document.
Why is my text file empty?
Because the PDF is a scan — a picture of a page with no text layer. Extraction can only return text that is actually stored in the file. OCR would be needed first.
Is the layout preserved?
No, and that is the point. You get the words in reading order. For layout, use PDF to HTML or PDF to Word instead.
Will Hindi, Tamil or accented European text come out correctly?
Yes, provided the PDF stores them properly. The output is UTF-8, so the characters are preserved as they were.
Related tools
Other things you can do with the same document.