PDF to Text
Pull all text out of a PDF, with reading-order or layout modes.
Choose PDF file
or drop it anywhere on this page
PDF
Processed on your device — never uploaded
How to pdf to text
- Open a PDF.
- Choose the extraction mode.
- Download the text file.
About this tool
Plain text extraction from a PDF is the most reliable of the conversion operations, because it does not try to infer layout — it just captures the characters in the right order. The reading-order mode handles multi-column documents by traversing columns in the correct sequence rather than mixing lines from different columns.
Whitespace normalisation matters more than it sounds. PDFs routinely embed invisible zero-width characters between every character in a word, or split a single word across multiple text runs with a space character that has no spacing value. The normalisation step collapses that noise into ordinary text.
Questions
What is the difference between reading order and layout mode?
Reading order follows the logical flow of the document: heading first, then paragraphs, then footnotes. It is the most useful mode for most purposes. Layout mode adds spaces to approximate the visual column structure using character positions, which can be useful for simple tables but produces noisy output on anything complex. Raw mode outputs characters in content stream order, which is often scrambled and useful mainly as a diagnostic.
Why is my extracted text garbled?
The most common cause is a custom font encoding: some PDFs use non-standard glyph mappings, especially when the font was subset for print without a proper Unicode map. The PDF is displaying text using drawn shapes, and what looks like "A" in the viewer has no Unicode character associated with it. Nothing can reliably extract text from those PDFs without the original font.
Can it extract text from a scanned PDF?
Only if the scan already has a text layer added by OCR. A plain scan with no text layer has no extractable text. Use the OCR tool first.