The output is empty or gibberish — why?

Either the PDF is a scan (no text layer) or it uses fonts without proper Unicode mapping. For scans use OCR PDF; for broken font mapping, OCR is also the reliable fallback.

Are headers and footers included?

Yes, everything in the text layer is extracted, including running headers and page numbers.

Table cells come out as text separated by spaces in reading order. For a proper grid use PDF to Excel.

PDF Tools

PDF to Text

Copy everything out of a PDF at once — for a word count, a translation tool, a script, or just reading it in a plain editor.

Runs in your browser — files never leave your device.

Drop PDF file here

or click to browse · paste from clipboard · up to 100 MB

Select file

Options

Line handling

Insert a marker between pages

Why convert PDF to TXT

Selecting text across 80 pages in a viewer is tedious and loses paragraph breaks. Extraction reads the whole text layer, reassembles lines into paragraphs and keeps page order.

Everything happens in your browser, which makes this safe for confidential documents. If the PDF is a scan (no selectable text), the result will be empty — use OCR PDF first to add a text layer.

How it works

Drop PDF file onto the box above, click it to browse, or paste from the clipboard.
Adjust the options if you need to — the defaults suit most cases.
Press Convert. The work happens on your device, so speed depends on your computer or phone.
Download the TXT.

About the formats

PDF · Portable Document Format · .pdf

The fixed-layout document standard: looks the same on every device and printer, which is why forms, invoices, contracts and reports are shared as PDF.

A PDF can contain vector text, embedded fonts, images, form fields, annotations and digital signatures.
Scanned PDFs are just pictures of pages; they need OCR before the text can be searched or copied.
PDF is an open ISO standard (ISO 32000) since 2008.

TXT · Plain text · .txt

Just characters, no formatting: the most portable format there is, opened by every editor ever written.

Plain text has no fonts, colours or images; only the words, line breaks and tabs survive.
Encoding matters: UTF-8 is the modern default; older Windows files may use Windows-1252 and show odd characters for accented letters.
Line endings differ between Windows (CRLF) and macOS/Linux (LF), which some tools care about.