PDF to Text Converter

About PDF to Text Converter

PDF to Text Converter pulls the words out of a PDF and shows them as plain text you can copy, search or save. It reads up to 10 files in one go, lets you pick pages, and can read scanned pages too, in English and Hindi. Your files are opened on your own device and are not uploaded.

First, find out which kind of PDF you have

Open your PDF and try to select a sentence with the mouse. If the words highlight, the file has a text layer, and the tool simply reads it. If the whole page behaves like one picture, it is a scan. A scan has no text inside it, only a photo of a page, so the words have to be recognised from the picture. That step is called OCR.

You do not have to decide this yourself. The Scanned pages (OCR) menu starts on Auto, which uses the text layer wherever a page has one and reads only the pages that have almost none. Choose Off to use the text layer only, or Always to read every page as a picture. Always is the choice when a text layer exists but is wrong.

Reading order, Keep layout, or one line per line

PDFs store text in small pieces with positions, not as sentences. Text layout decides how those pieces are put back together.

The default is Reading order. It joins lines into paragraphs and starts a new paragraph where the gap between lines grows. If a page has two columns, it reads the left column first and then the right, so sentences do not zig-zag across the page. Bullets and numbered points start new paragraphs.

Invoices, timetables and forms read much better in Keep layout, which holds the spacing so columns and tables line up with spaces between them. The result box uses a fixed-width font to make that visible.

One line per line copies each line as it appears on the page and joins nothing. Lists and addresses, where the line breaks mean something, suit it best.

Example

An invoice line has "Invoice No." on the left and the number far to the right. Reading order joins them with a single space. Keep layout keeps the gap, so the number stays out on the right, under its own column.

Headers, footers and page numbers

A report that repeats its title at the top and "Page 3 of 40" at the bottom fills your text with noise. Two of the checkboxes deal with this.

The tool looks at the top two and bottom two lines of each page. A line that repeats on at least half the pages is treated as a header or footer and removed. Digits are ignored when lines are compared, so "Confidential - page 3" and "Confidential - page 4" count as the same line. This needs a file of three or more pages with a text layer. Lines that look like page numbers, such as 7, Page 7 of 66 or - 7 -, are removed even in a short file.

Pages read with OCR are not cleaned this way. A note under the stats says how many lines were removed, so you can tell the cleanup ran. Turn both boxes off if the lines at the top or bottom matter to you.

Three more boxes help with tidy output. Join words split by a hyphen glues back a word that was broken across two lines. It works in Reading order, and only when the next line starts with a lowercase letter, so a real hyphen in a name is left alone. Collapse extra blank lines stops large gaps from piling up. Add page-break markers puts a line such as --- Page 7 --- between pages, which helps when you need to find where a quote came from.

Scanned pages and Hindi

For OCR, pick the language: English and Hindi together, English only, or Hindi only. English and Hindi is the default, and it is the right choice for a document that mixes both. The first OCR run has to load the reading engine, so it starts slowly. A status line shows which page is being read.

The tool reads up to 120 scanned pages per file in one run. If a file has more, it says so, and you can run the rest with a page range.

Some older Hindi PDFs were typed in fonts from before Unicode, such as Kruti Dev. They look fine on screen, but the text inside is a string of odd symbols. The tool checks for this, and when it finds it, those pages are read as pictures instead. A note tells you that it did.

After OCR you see an average confidence score. A high score is a good sign and a low one means you should read the text with care. Either way, check names, phone numbers and amounts against the PDF. OCR is made for printed text, and handwriting and very small print are the usual places where it goes wrong.

Reading only the part you need

A 120-page report may need just one chapter. Type 41-58 in the Pages box and only those pages are read. The page-break markers and the page menu keep the original numbers, so the first page of your result is labelled 41, not 1. That helps when you quote a passage and need to say where it came from.

Reading fewer pages also keeps OCR within its cap. If a scanned file has 300 pages, read it in chunks of 100, and save each result before you start the next.

Many files, page ranges and passwords

Drop up to 10 PDFs, each up to 150 MB, with at most 1,500 pages in one run. Each file gets its own tab in the results.

The Pages box takes 1-3, 7, 10-12, and it applies to every file you added. If one file has fewer pages than the range reaches, the tool tells you which limit applies. For different ranges per file, run them separately.

A PDF that needs a password to open shows a password box under its name. Type the password and press the button beside it. A wrong password gets a clear message, and the Extract button stays off until every file is open. If a file will not open that way, Unlock PDF is the other route.

What you can do with the text

The result box shows one file at a time. A page menu lets you look at a single page. Find in text counts matches and jumps to the next one, and Wrap long lines turns off sideways scrolling. The numbers above the box show pages, words, characters and reading time. Reading time is words divided by 200, so 15,396 words shows 77 min.

Below the box, a details panel shows what the PDF says about itself, when those fields are filled in: title, author, page size, creation date and the program that made it. A row of top keywords lists the words used most often, and clicking one jumps to it in the text. Further down, the tool lists the emails, web links, phone numbers, dates and amounts it found, each with a Copy button. The whole list downloads as a CSV file.

Saving is covered in the next section. When you process two or more files, a ZIP button saves one TXT file per PDF.

Which format to save

Pick the file by what happens next. TXT is the plain text you see in the box, for the page you are viewing or for all pages. It suits pasting into notes or a form. Markdown gives every page its own heading, which suits notes apps and documentation. JSON holds the text of each page as a list, a flag for pages read with OCR and the document details, so it fits scripts. HTML makes a simple web page of the text. Word (.doc) opens in Word when the next step is editing.

For a table, use Keep layout and TXT. The columns stay lined up when you paste into an editor that uses a fixed-width font.

What this tool will not do

It gives you text only. Pictures, charts and colours are not part of the result, and a table comes out as text, not as rows and cells in a spreadsheet. Bold, italics and font sizes are gone too. If you need an editable document with its look kept, try PDF to Word. To count the words or tidy the result, the Word Counter and Text Summarizer pick up where this tool stops. For one chapter of a big file, Split PDF can cut it out first.

Where your files go

The reading happens in your browser tab. The PDFs and the text you extract are not uploaded or stored, and they are gone when you close the tab. Save what you need first, and on a shared computer close the tab afterwards.