PDF to Text
Extract the text from a PDF in your browser and download it as a .txt file. A PDF with no text layer, such as a scan, is reported rather than guessed.
Tool workspace
Nothing is uploaded. Files are read in this tab and stay on your machine.
Extract text from a PDF
Save your download before you leave the page — it exists only in this tab.
How do I extract text from a PDF?
Choose one PDF, up to 150 MiB and 200 pages.
Select Extract text. If the PDF asks for a password, enter it and try again.
Check the preview, then download the full text as a .txt file before resetting or leaving the page.
How does PDF to Text read the text?
PDF to Text extracts the text already inside a PDF and saves it as a .txt file you can copy from or search. The document stays in this browser tab while the tool works.
The PDF is read in this browser tab by a PDF reader served with this site, running in a separate background worker so the page stays responsive. Text is kept in the order each page supplies it, line breaks the PDF marks are kept, and a page-break (form-feed) character separates one page's text from the next, which TXT to PDF reads as a new page. The tool does not send the PDF to a conversion service.
How Xenmark makes it easy to copy the text out of a PDF
Every page's text in one download
Text from every page, up to 200 of them, is gathered into a single .txt file, with a page-break (form-feed) character between one page's text and the next.
Nothing leaves your machine
Nothing is uploaded. Files are read in this tab and processed in memory, with no account and no server for them to go to.
Preview before you save
The first 20,000 characters appear in a read-only box, with page and character counts, so you can judge the result before saving the complete file.
A straight answer on scanned pages
If the whole PDF has no extractable text, the tool says so plainly instead of handing you an empty file, which is a quick way to tell whether OCR is needed.
Protected PDFs open with your password
When a PDF needs a password, you are asked for it for that attempt only, and it is cleared once the extraction finishes, fails or is reset.
Nothing to install
It runs in the browser you already have. There is no plug-in, no desktop application and no sign-up to get through first.
Limitations
What this tool does not do, stated up front.
The text comes out in the order the PDF stores it, which does not reliably rebuild columns, tables, equations or the page layout, and a word the PDF stores in pieces can come out with a space inside it.
Scanned pages give no text, because optical character recognition (OCR) is not included. A PDF whose text runs past 2 million characters, or that takes longer than 30 seconds to read, is refused rather than cut short.
A PDF whose security settings forbid copying text is refused. Missing or unusual font mappings can produce wrong or missing characters, and a malformed file is reported rather than silently repaired.
Questions
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Yes, if you have the password: enter it when asked. A PDF whose security settings forbid copying text is refused.
Why is the extracted text in an unexpected order?
A PDF stores positioned text fragments rather than a word-processing document structure. The tool keeps the order supplied by the PDF reader but does not claim to rebuild columns, tables or page layout.
Can it read a scanned PDF?
Only if it already has a text layer; this tool does not do OCR. A PDF with no text at all is reported as such, so you know OCR is needed.
Why did Xenmark build a free PDF text extractor?
Xenmark AS is a Norwegian software company building browser-based drawing review tools for owners, consultants, operators and other teams that receive and review technical drawings. Those teams handle PDFs every day, and not every file should be sent to a website just to merge, split or check it — a tender document, a client’s drawing set, a revision that is not released yet. So these everyday tools are free and run entirely in your browser: no account, no upload step, and no server ever receives the file. You can check that yourself — open your browser’s network tab, extract some text, and watch nothing leave. What this tool cannot do is listed under Limitations above.
Related tools
All 44 other tools
Build and edit PDFs
Convert
Drawing and measurement
Inspect and check
Registers and logs
Markup and revisions
Specialist and reference
Beyond the free tools
Reviewing the drawings, not just handling the files?
Xenmark is affordable PDF markup and structured drawing review in the browser. Invite reviewers, pin numbered comments on the sheet, track every one by author and status, and export a clean PDF and Excel when the review is done. Unlike these tools, a review is shared, so its drawings are uploaded to your Xenmark project.
Free forever plan. Reviewers you invite never pay.