Convert PDF to TXT
Convert PDF to TXT free in your browser. No upload, no signup, no watermark. Files stay on your device.
drop a .pdf file
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guide
how to convert pdf to txt
Drop your PDF file
Drag your PDF file into the drop zone above, or click the box to pick a file from your computer or phone. The browser reads the file directly — nothing uploads.
Click Convert
The page runs PDF.js on your device to decode the Portable Document Format and encode it as Plain Text. Most conversions finish in a few seconds; large or codec-heavy files (RAW, video) can take longer.
Download the TXT file
When the conversion finishes, the TXT files arrive as a ZIP — one TXT per source page. Open the ZIP and save the pages anywhere on your device.
note: Extracts encoded text from each page. Scanned PDFs (where pages are images, not text) return little or nothing — those need OCR.
FAQ
common questions
Will this extract text from a scanned PDF?
No — only from PDFs that already have a text layer. PDFs created from Word, Pages, or any digital document have selectable text the converter reads directly. PDFs that are scanned images of paper documents have NO text layer — they're just pictures of text. For those, you'd need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to first convert the image to text; tools like Adobe Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader, or Tesseract handle that step.
Will the formatting be preserved?
No — plain text is exactly that. Headings lose their styling, lists lose their bullets / numbering (though indentation usually survives), tables flatten into space-separated columns, and font / colour / image content is dropped entirely. The output captures the words in reading order; it's meant for re-use of content, not for preserving the document's appearance.
Does the reading order match the visual order?
Usually yes for single-column documents, often no for multi-column layouts. PDF text extraction reads characters in the order they were placed in the file, which for simple documents matches what you see. For multi-column layouts, magazine spreads, or PDFs with text boxes, the extraction can interleave columns or reorder content unexpectedly. If reading order matters, manual cleanup may be needed.
What happens to images, links, and tables?
Images: dropped entirely (text-only output). Hyperlinks: the URL text appears but the clickable behaviour is gone. Tables: extracted as text with cells separated by spaces or tabs — column alignment is approximate, not preserved as table structure. For preserving structure, convert to HTML or DOCX instead of plain text.
What's the output file like?
A plain .txt file with UTF-8 encoding. Opens in every text editor (Notepad, TextEdit, VS Code), every email client, every command-line tool. Very small — typically a fraction of the source PDF size since image / font / styling data is all removed. Best for: feeding text into other tools, archival text extraction, content re-use.