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PDF to Text Converter

Pull the text out of a PDF to quote it, translate it or reuse it elsewhere. The text is read page by page in your browser, and you can rejoin lines that the PDF layout split in the middle of sentences.

Runs in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded

or drop a file here

How to use

  1. Choose or drop a PDF file.
  2. Wait while each page is read; the text appears below.
  3. Turn on "Merge wrapped lines into paragraphs" if sentences are broken across lines.
  4. Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.

Options explained

Mark page breaks
Adds a "--- Page N ---" line before each page so you can find where text came from.
Merge wrapped lines into paragraphs
PDFs store each printed line separately. This joins lines within a paragraph, removes line-end hyphens and keeps blank lines, list items and lines ending in a full stop as they are.

What “Merge wrapped lines into paragraphs” does

A PDF stores text as printed lines, so one paragraph arrives as several short lines. Here is a page as extracted:

Revenue grew steadily dur-
ing the year, driven by
new customers.

- First item
- Second item

With Merge wrapped lines into paragraphs on, and Mark page breaks left on, the result is:

--- Page 1 ---

Revenue grew steadily during the year, driven by new customers.

- First item
- Second item

A line is not joined to the one above it when that line ends with a full stop, !, ?, a colon, a semicolon or a closing quote or bracket, when it starts like a list item, or when a blank line separates them. A hyphen at the end of a line is removed when it follows a letter and the next line starts with a lowercase letter, so a real hyphenated word that happens to break at the hyphen, such as well-known, loses its hyphen. No space is added between Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters.

Frequently asked questions

Why is no text found?

Scanned documents and photos saved as PDF contain images of text rather than text. Those need optical character recognition (OCR), which this tool does not do.

Why is the text in the wrong order?

Text is extracted in the order it is stored in the file. Multi-column layouts, tables and text boxes are sometimes stored out of reading order.

Does it work with Chinese, Japanese and other languages?

Yes. Character maps for CJK fonts are included, so text from Chinese, Japanese and Korean PDFs comes out correctly.

Privacy

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files and text are processed on your device and are never uploaded to our servers.

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