Free PDF to plain text, with OCR when you need it
Everything stays in your browser
Text laid out close to the original
Frequently asked questions
Is this PDF to text converter really free?
Yes, converting is free with no page limit and no account needed.
Can it read scanned PDFs or PDFs that are just photos of a page?
Turn on the OCR option before converting. It runs optical character recognition on each page image, entirely in your browser, so it also works for scanned documents and photographed pages, not just PDFs with selectable text.
Do I need to sign up or give my email?
No. There is no sign-up, no email address, and no watermark on the file you download.
Can I copy the text instead of downloading a file?
Yes, once the text is extracted you can either copy it straight to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file — whichever you need.
What can I do with the .txt file afterwards?
A plain .txt file opens directly in Notepad, TextEdit, or any text editor, with no PDF formatting left in it, ready to paste elsewhere.
How do I convert PDF to a text file on a Mac?
A Mac does not have a single built-in "export as .txt" button for PDFs. This browser-based tool works the same way on Mac, Windows, Chromebook or a phone, without needing any extra software.
How is this different from tools like iLovePDF, Adobe or Convertio?
They do the same basic job — PDF text extraction — but this tool processes the file in your browser instead of uploading it to a server, and there is no daily limit or account wall.
Is the code behind this open source?
The two engines doing the actual work — PDF.js for reading the PDF and Tesseract.js for OCR — are both open-source projects. This page just wires them together.
What if my PDF is password protected?
You will be asked to enter the password before the file is opened. It is only used in your browser to unlock the PDF, never sent anywhere.