PDF to TXT Converter
Extract the text from a PDF in your browser. Useful for feeding into AI tools, search/grep across many documents, transcription review, archival, or any time you just need the words without the layout. The PDF never leaves your device — particularly important when the PDF contains sensitive information.
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Sensitive documents stay private
Resumes, contracts, NDAs, notes you'd never paste into a chatbot — these are the documents most worth keeping off cloud converters. Everything here happens in your browser. The converted file goes straight to your downloads, then it's gone from memory.
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PDF → TXT done right
Real-text PDFs (typed documents, saved-as-PDF Word docs, exports from design tools) give you the complete content with paragraph structure preserved. Page breaks become "----" separators in the output. Scanned PDFs (images of text) need OCR — which this tool doesn't do — and the output will be empty or very short.
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No signup, no watermark, no email
You don't make an account, you don't enter an email, you don't see ads, and the output isn't watermarked. Free in the actual sense of the word — not "free for now, while we figure out a paywall."
Frequently asked questions
Does my file ever leave my device?
No. The conversion runs entirely in your browser. The file is read into memory, processed by a JavaScript library running in the same tab, and the result is delivered straight to your downloads. Open DevTools while you convert — you'll see zero network traffic carrying your file. This matters for anything sensitive: contracts, drafts, financial documents, personal notes.
Is there a file size limit?
No fixed limit. The real ceiling is your device's memory. Most text and PDF files are small enough that this is never a concern — multi-megabyte documents convert fine on phones. Very large files (hundreds of MB) may struggle on older or memory-constrained devices.
What about the original file?
Untouched. The converted file is a separate copy that lands in your downloads. Your original stays exactly where it was on disk.
Does this work on mobile?
Yes. Tap the drop zone to open your phone's file picker, choose a file from Files / Downloads / Drive / iCloud, hit Convert. The result downloads to your device's standard download location.
How is this different from online converter sites that ask for an email?
Those sites upload your file to their servers, run conversion server-side, and email you a download link. They get to read your document, log your IP, and store the file (for some period). This tool does none of that — everything runs in your browser tab. We don't even have an account system, so there's nothing to sign up for and nothing to log out of.
What about scanned PDFs?
Scanned PDFs are images of text — there's no underlying text data for the converter to extract. If your output is empty or very short, that's almost certainly the cause; the tool will flag this with a notice when it detects suspiciously low text content. To get text from a scan, you need OCR (optical character recognition), which is a separate, much larger piece of software. Free options: Google Drive (right-click → Open with Google Docs converts on upload), Adobe's online OCR, or command-line Tesseract. Hosted OCR services upload your file, so be mindful for sensitive content.
Will the layout / formatting be preserved?
Plain text can't represent layout — no columns, no font sizes, no bold or italic. The output is just the text in reading order, with newlines where the PDF had visual line breaks. Multi-column PDFs are tricky: the reading order depends on how the PDF was structured (well-tagged PDFs read correctly; poorly-tagged ones may interleave columns). Tables flatten to lines of text.
What encoding does the .txt use?
UTF-8, with a BOM omitted (the modern default). Handles every character your PDF might contain — international names, special punctuation, math symbols, emoji. Opens cleanly in Notepad, VS Code, TextEdit, vim, or any modern editor.
What's the "----" between pages?
A page separator inserted between each page's content so you can tell where one page ended and the next began. Strip them out with find-and-replace if you don't want them, or use them to chunk content for further processing (one page at a time into an AI prompt, for example).