File4Edit

PDF to text

Extract the text from a PDF and save it as a .txt or .md file, free and in your browser with no upload. It reads the text layer only: a scanned page has none, and this tool does not do OCR.

Read the text out of a PDF and keep it as a .txt or .md file. A scanned page has no text layer to read, and this says so rather than handing you an empty file.

In detail

PDF to text reads the text layer out of a document and hands it back as a .txt or .md file, over a page range you choose. Text is recovered from the page's own content rather than by recognizing shapes, so it comes back exactly as it was stored. Wrapped lines are joined and hyphenated words rejoined, or you can keep the original line breaks.

A scanned page has no text layer at all: the words on it are pixels. This tool does not do OCR (optical character recognition), so it says when a page holds no text rather than handing you an empty file. Columns and tables can come back in the wrong order, because a PDF stores text as positioned fragments.

PDF to text at a glance

Input
One PDF
Output
A .txt or .md file, or the text copied to the clipboard
What it does
  • Save as .txt or .md
  • Page ranges
  • Page separators: a blank line, a marker or none
  • Joins wrapped lines and hyphenated words
  • Live character and word counts
Who it is for
Anyone who needs the words from a report, a paper or a contract without retyping them.
Limits
  • No OCR: scanned pages have no text to extract.
  • Multi-column layouts and tables may come out in the wrong order.
Privacy
Runs entirely in your browser: the PDF is never uploaded, and nothing is kept after you close the tab.

How to extract text from a PDF

  1. Open the PDF Drop the file onto the page. The text of the first page appears straight away.
  2. Choose the pages Every page, or a range such as 1-3,7.
  3. Pick how pages are separated A blank line, a marker naming each page, or nothing at all.
  4. Check the result Character and word counts update live, and the text can be copied as well as saved.
  5. Save as .txt or .md The file is written in your browser and handed to you as a download.

PDF to text: common questions

Why does my scanned PDF produce no text?

Because there is none in it. A page produced by a scanner or a phone camera is a photograph wrapped in a PDF, and the words you can read are pixels rather than characters. Recovering them needs optical character recognition, which File4Edit does not do, so the tool tells you it found no text rather than saving an empty file.

Why is the text order sometimes wrong?

PDF stores text as positioned fragments with no notion of reading order, so a two-column layout or a page with sidebars can interleave when it is read back in the order the fragments were written. Simple single-column documents come out in order; complex layouts may need tidying.

Are the words run together?

The tool inserts a space where the gap between two fragments is wide enough to be one. PDFs that position every character individually can still produce the occasional join, which is a property of how the file was written rather than of the extraction.