Free PDF tool
PDF to Text
Get the words out, without retyping them.
A PDF made from a word processor carries a real text layer underneath the layout. Extracting it gives you something you can paste into an email, search properly, or feed to another tool — without copying page by page and fighting the line breaks.
The text comes out page by page, with page markers you can turn off. What you cannot get out is text that was never there: a scan is a picture of words, and pulling text from it needs OCR, which this tool does not do.
How to use it
- 01Drop in the PDF.
- 02Choose whether to mark where each page begins.
- 03Extract, then copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
Why did I get no text at all?
The PDF is almost certainly a scan — the pages are images, so there is no text layer to extract. You would need OCR software to recognise the words in those images.
Why is the spacing odd in places?
PDFs store text as positioned fragments, not as sentences. Multi-column layouts, tables and headers can come out in an order that reflects how they were drawn rather than how they read.
Does it keep the formatting?
No — this produces plain text. Bold, headings, tables and colours are layout information that a .txt file cannot carry.
Related tools
- PDF to JPG / PNGTurn pages into image files at whatever resolution you need.
- PDF Metadata Viewer & EditorSee and edit the author, title and software recorded inside a PDF — or strip it.
- Base64 EncoderEncode text or a file to a Base64 string.
- Compress PDFShrink a PDF to fit an upload limit, with the quality trade-off made explicit.
This is what Purgify automates.
Connect your cloud accounts and Purgify finds duplicates and reclaimable space like this — across all of them, on a schedule.
Want early access? Write to us at [email protected]