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PDF to Text

Free
Extract every word from a PDF as plain .txt — preserves reading order, runs in your browser.

What you'll get: a plain .txt file with every word from your PDF in reading order. For another use, try PDF to Markdown.

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Stays in your browser
Free tools run fully on-device — nothing is uploaded to a server.
No watermarks
Clean output, no branding, no daily limits.
Free forever
No signup required. Seriously.

Why people convert PDFs to text

A PDF is a layout container. Plain text is a content container. Once it's text, every downstream tool — search, translation, summarization, version-control — works.

Translation prep
Translation services charge by the word. A clean .txt export lets you get an accurate quote and feed the result into any CAT tool without layout interference.
Full-text search
Drop the .txt into your editor or a search-indexer and find every occurrence across documents instantly. Faster than re-opening each PDF.
AI summarization input
Most LLM tools work best with plain text. Extract once, summarize many times — across ChatGPT, Claude, local models, or our own AI · Summarize tool.
Version comparison
Diffing two PDFs is painful; diffing two .txt files is one git command. Useful for legal redlines, contract reviews, and academic revisions.
Repurpose content
Pull text out of an existing PDF to repost on a blog, paste into a CMS, or use as a starting draft for new material.

How PDF to Text works

Three steps, no signup, no uploads.

  1. STEP 1
    Drop your PDF
    Up to 100 MB. Files stay in your browser — never uploaded.
  2. STEP 2
    Click Extract text
    Google PDFium reads every page in reading order, with page-break markers between pages.
  3. STEP 3
    Copy or download .txt
    Plain UTF-8 text. Paste anywhere or save as a .txt file for downstream pipelines.

What makes pdfcraft ai different

  • Same engine Chrome uses
    PDFium is Google's PDF engine — the one that powers Chrome's built-in PDF viewer. We compile it to WebAssembly so it runs in your browser at near-native speed.
  • 100% local processing
    Most free PDF tools upload your file to a server, process it, and stream the result back. We don't. Your file lives in your browser tab and never touches our infrastructure. Verifiable in your browser's Network panel.
  • No watermark, no signup, no daily limit
    Convert 1 PDF or 1,000. We don't gate on volume because there's nothing to gate on — the engine runs on your machine.
  • Honest about limitations
    When something the tool can't do (encrypted PDFs, cross-reference streams), we tell you clearly instead of failing silently. Same for partial results: sampled vs exact, embedded vs not.
  • Open standards, free engines
    PDFium is BSD/Apache licensed (free for any use). We don't pay vendor license fees and pass that savings on to you (and to ourselves) as a free, ad-supported tool with no upgrade-to-pro pressure.

Frequently asked questions

What about formatting — headings, lists, tables?
Layout is flattened to reading order. PDFium gives us the text in the order it appears on the page. Tables come out as space-separated rows, lists lose their bullet markers, headings lose their style. If layout matters, use PDF to Markdown or PDF to HTML for lightly structured output.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
No. Scans are images, so there's no extractable text. Run Make PDF Searchable (AI · OCR) first to overlay invisible text on the scan, then come back here.
What's the file size limit?
100 MB. Larger files would risk freezing the browser tab during PDFium's parse step. For documents above 100 MB, split first.
Is anything uploaded?
No. PDFium runs as WebAssembly in your browser. Your file never touches our servers. You can verify in your browser's Network tab — there's no upload request.
Why are there random line breaks in the middle of paragraphs?
PDF stores text in lines, not paragraphs. PDFium gives back what's there. Most PDF→text tools (including pdftotext) have this artefact. For cleaner paragraph reflow, use PDF to Markdown which adds basic paragraph-merge heuristics.

Want lightly structured output?

PDF to Markdown adds page headers and paragraph reflow. PDF to HTML wraps paragraphs in <p> tags. Same engine, more structure preserved.

Try PDF to Markdown

Related PDF tools

Other tools in the Convert category — built on the same private, in-browser pipeline.

Use cases for this tool

Step-by-step workflows that put this tool to work.

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