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PDF to Text

Extract the text layer of PDF files into UTF-8 .txt files in your browser, with Unicode font mapping and batch processing. No upload, no OCR.

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Extract the text layer of PDF files into plain UTF-8 .txt files in the browser — for search, diffs or feeding text to scripts. Nothing is uploaded and no OCR is involved.

Detailed Functionality

The extractor reads the text-showing commands of every page and decodes characters through the font's ToUnicode map, the embedded TrueType cmap or WinAnsi encoding, so Cyrillic and other non-Latin text comes out correctly when the PDF provides the mapping. A new line starts wherever the PDF moves to the next line, and pages are separated by a blank line.

Scanned PDFs contain only images and produce empty text, because there is no OCR. Multi-column layouts and tables are flattened in the order the text is stored in the file, and spaces between words depend on how the PDF was produced. Password-protected PDFs are rejected with a clear message.

Add several PDFs at once: they are processed one after another in a Web Worker with a progress bar, Cancel stops immediately, and every finished row gets Download TXT, which saves <name>.txt.

Practical Examples

Two-page document: a PDF whose pages read “Second doc page A” and “Second doc page B” gives Second doc page A, an empty line, Second doc page B.

Large file: a 2,500-page 5.44 MB PDF produces a 36 KB big.txt while the page stays responsive.

Scanned contract: a PDF made of page images gives an empty .txt — run OCR elsewhere first.

Password-protected file: shows “locked.pdf: the PDF is password-protected and can't be processed.” while the other files in the batch are still extracted.

How to Use This Tool

  1. Add PDF files

    Click Choose file or drop one or more PDFs onto Upload PDF. They appear under Files to Process.

  2. Extract

    Click Extract Text. The progress bar shows the current file; Cancel stops the batch.

  3. Download the text

    Click Download TXT on a row to save <name>.txt (UTF-8).

Tips and Best Practices

  • If the result is empty, the PDF is probably a scan: there is no text layer to extract.
  • Garbled characters mean the PDF has no usable Unicode mapping for its font; copying from a PDF viewer will usually fail the same way.
  • Tables and columns come out in storage order, so check the line order before parsing the text with scripts.
  • Already extracted files are skipped when you click Extract Text again, so you can add more files to the same list.