PDF to Text

Sometimes the formatting is exactly what you do not want. You might be quoting three paragraphs from a report, pasting a document into a translator or a chat assistant, running a word count, or grepping through a stack of files for one clause. A plain .txt file drops straight into any editor, spreadsheet or script.

Output is UTF-8, so accented characters and non-Latin scripts survive, and the text is ordered by position on the page, top to bottom and left to right. That is not always the reading order: two columns at the same height merge into one line, tables lose their alignment and become loose lines, and page headers and footers repeat wherever they occurred. Reading through the result once before you rely on it is worth the minute it takes.

Scanned documents return nothing at all, because their pages contain images of letters rather than letters, and pdf-ocr is the tool that reads those. If you would rather have the same words as an editable Word file, pdf-to-docx builds one, though it also carries the text alone and none of the layout. Extraction happens in your browser, so nothing is transmitted anywhere.