PDF → Text

extract raw text · one .txt per source file

Drop one or more PDFs and pull the text content into a plain-text file per input. Page boundaries are marked with a customisable separator.

When to use this tool

Pull text out of a PDF for editing, searching, translating, pasting into a chat, or feeding to another tool. The output is plain UTF-8 text — no formatting, no layout. Great for "I just need the words" tasks.

Step by step

1. Drop the PDFs. Each input becomes one .txt file in the output.
2. Customise the page separator if you need a specific divider between pages. Default is --- Page {n} --- on its own line. Use {n} for the page number.
3. Click "Extract & download". Each result has a thumbnail-free download row; click to save the .txt.

Common use cases

• Translation. Paste extracted text into Google Translate or DeepL; PDFs are awkward to translate directly.
• Searching. grep / ripgrep across a folder of .txt files is much faster than scanning PDFs.
• Quoting. Pull a paragraph out of a research paper to drop into your notes.
• LLM context. Most AI chatbots accept text better than PDFs — extract first, paste in.
• Word-counts and analysis. Run linguistic tools (NLTK, spaCy) on the extracted text.
• Plain-text archive. Convert a folder of PDFs to text for long-term, format-independent storage.

Common mistakes

• Scanned PDFs return empty. If the file is an image of text (a scan), there's no text layer — extraction returns nothing. Use an OCR tool first (ocrmypdf, Tesseract).
• Expecting layout fidelity. Columns get flattened, tables come out as runs of words. For structured output try PDF → Markdown; for tabular data, a dedicated table-extraction tool.
• Encoding issues. PDFs sometimes use unusual encodings; the result may have funny characters in places. Check the output and substitute as needed.

FAQ