Get the words, leave the layout behind
Sometimes you don’t need the PDF itself, only what it says. Copying text page by page from a reader is slow and often breaks lines in odd places. PDF to TXT takes the whole document and writes its text into a .txt file, line by line, following the reading order of each page.
Plain text opens on any device and in any program: a basic notepad, a code editor, a spreadsheet import, a translation tool or a script. It is also light, so even a long report turns into a small file that is easy to search, compare or paste elsewhere.
Page separators
You can add a separator between pages. With it on, you can still tell where each page began, which helps when you need to cite a page number or check a passage against the original. With it off, the text flows as one continuous document, which is handier when you plan to paste it into another file or feed it to a program.
Either way, the text keeps its line breaks, so paragraphs and short lines such as addresses or list items stay on their own lines.
Everyday uses
Researchers pull the text from articles to search across many papers at once or to quote passages accurately. Translators extract the source text of a brochure or manual to load it into their tools. Developers and analysts turn reports into text so a script can find figures, names or dates. People with a long contract can extract it to read it in a simple editor, or to paste a clause into an email without fighting the formatting.
It also helps when you want to reuse the wording of an old document you only have as a PDF, such as a policy, a set of instructions or a letter.
What it does not keep
A .txt file holds only characters. Bold and italics, tables, columns, images and fonts are not kept. Tables come out as lines of text, so if you need the rows and columns, use PDF to Excel. If you want an editable document with headings and formatting, PDF to Word is the better fit, and PDF to Markdown keeps headings, lists and links in a simple text format.
Scanned PDFs are pictures of pages and contain no text to extract. Run them through OCR PDF first, then convert the result here.
Private and free
The extraction runs in your browser. Your PDF never leaves your device and nothing is stored on our side. ConvertirDocs is 100% free: no sign-up, no limits and no paid version. Password-protected files need to be unlocked first with Unlock PDF.