PDFora
Free forever · nothing uploaded

PDF to Text

This tool pulls the actual text out of a PDF, entirely in your browser — the words already in the file, not a picture of them. Copy it or download it as a .txt file. It reads existing text; it does not recognise text in a scanned image. No signup, no watermark, nothing uploaded.

  • No signup
  • No watermark
  • No file limit
  • Free at download

Three steps

Get the text outin a couple of seconds.

  1. Select your PDF, or drop it onto the page. It opens in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
  2. The text on every page is read out automatically.
  3. Copy it, or download the whole thing as a .txt file.

Why use this tool

The words,without the PDF.

A free online PDF-to-text extractor with no app to install. Useful for pulling a quote, pasting a paragraph somewhere else, or getting a whole document into a plain text editor.

  • Real text, not a guessReads the actual text layer already inside the PDF — the exact words, not an approximation.
  • Copy or downloadSelect and copy just the part you need, or grab the whole document as a .txt file.
  • InstantNo upload and no processing queue — text appears as soon as the file opens.
  • Honest about scansA scanned page with no text layer comes back empty, and the page tells you so — this does not OCR an image.

Need a Word document instead of plain text?

PDF to Word keeps real paragraphs, tables and formatting rather than flattening everything to text.

The question everybody asks

Is it really free?

Yes. No account, no trial, no watermark on the output, no cap on file size or page count, and no payment step between you and the download button.

It is free because it is cheap to run: your PDF’s text is read by your own browser, so there is no upload, no server doing the work and no storage to pay for. That is also why the privacy answer is short — the file never leaves your device.

Why this is free → How files are handled

FAQ

Questions peopleactually ask.

Does this work on a scanned PDF?

No — this reads the text that already exists inside the PDF file. A scanned page is really just a photo with no text behind it, so it comes back empty. OCR PDF handles that different job — recognising text in an image rather than reading text that is already there.

Will columns and tables come out in the right order?

Text comes out in the order pdf.js detects on the page, line by line. Simple single-column documents extract cleanly; multi-column layouts and tables can interleave, since a PDF has no real concept of "columns" — only where each piece of text sits.

Can I copy just part of the result?

Yes — the extracted text is shown in a normal text box, so you can select any part of it and copy just that, or use "Copy text" for everything at once.

Is my file uploaded anywhere?

No. The PDF is opened and its text read entirely in your browser tab.

Does this work on any PDF made from Word, Google Docs, or a website?

Yes — anything with a real text layer, which covers the large majority of PDFs that were not scanned from paper.

Is there a limit on document length?

No. Every page is read locally in your browser, so there is no upload cap and no per-page fee.

Related tools

Extracting text is one job.Here is the rest.

Dashed cards are in build — they are not links yet.