PDF to Text - Extract Text Privately in Your Browser
Get the raw words out of a PDF as a plain .txt file you can search, grep, diff, or paste anywhere. The output is unstyled UTF-8 text with one line per line detected on the page and a blank line between pages - nothing else, which is exactly what you want when the text is going into a script, a search index, or another program rather than in front of a reader. Extraction runs locally in your browser, so confidential contracts and reports never leave your device.
How to use this tool
Add your PDF file
Drag a PDF onto the drop area, or click to browse. Files up to 100 MB are supported.
Extract the text
Click Extract Text. Each page is read in order and its lines are reassembled top to bottom.
Download the .txt file
Save the plain text file to your device - nothing is sent anywhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
What exactly does the .txt file look like?
Unstyled UTF-8 text. Every line of text detected on a page becomes one line in the file, pages are separated by a blank line, and empty lines are dropped. There are no headings, no styles, and no page markers - a .txt file has no way to represent them.
Should I use this or PDF to Word?
Choose plain text when a machine is the next reader: feeding a script, building a search index, diffing two revisions of a contract, or pasting into a chat box. Choose PDF to Word when a person will edit the result, because the .docx keeps page breaks and gives you real paragraphs to restyle.
How are multi-column pages and tables handled?
Poorly, and deliberately so - extraction reads across the full width of the page, so text sitting at the same height in two different columns ends up on the same output line. Newspaper layouts, side-by-side translations, and wide tables will interleave. For those, extract the text and expect to re-split it yourself.
Does this tool work on scanned PDFs?
No, this is not OCR. It reads a text layer that already exists inside the file. A scan is a picture of a page with no such layer, so extraction stops and tells you rather than handing you an empty file.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The PDF is parsed by WebAssembly running inside this tab and the .txt file is assembled in memory on your machine. Nothing crosses the network, which is why the tool is safe to point at documents you could not legally upload to a third party.
Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?
Not directly. A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked before its text layer can be read at all, so run it through ConvertOwl's Unlock PDF tool with the correct password first, then extract text from the unlocked copy.
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