What about scanned PDFs?

A scan is just an image — there's no text layer to extract, so the output will be empty. Use the OCR tool to read text from a scan directly, or Searchable PDF to add a text layer and then extract from that.

How are page breaks marked?

Each page's text is separated by a line reading '--- Page Break ---'. That makes it easy to split the output back into pages with a script, or to delete the markers in one find-and-replace if you want continuous text.

Will the reading order be correct for multi-column layouts?

Lines are reconstructed by vertical position, which is right for single-column documents. In multi-column layouts, text at the same height in different columns can interleave — a fundamental limitation of positional extraction. Expect some rearranging for newspaper-style pages.

Are headers, footers, and page numbers included?

Yes — everything in the text layer is extracted, including repeated headers and footers. They're easy to strip afterward since they repeat verbatim on every page.

PDF → Text

Extract all text content from a PDF file.

Drop PDF files here or browse

Max 100MB per file

About PDF to Text

Underneath most PDFs is a text layer, and plenty of tasks need exactly that and nothing else: feeding a document into a script, indexing it for search, counting and analyzing its words, pasting clean content into another system without dragging formatting along. Convertora's PDF-to-Text tool extracts that layer from every page and gives you plain text — visible in a preview box, copyable in one click, or downloadable as a .txt file.

Extraction is position-aware: text fragments are grouped into lines based on where they sit on the page and emitted in top-to-bottom reading order, with each page's content separated by a clear page-break marker. PDFs up to 100MB are processed entirely in your browser via PDF.js, so confidential documents stay local.

How to use it

1Upload a PDF (up to 100MB).
2Click Extract Text. Each page's text fragments are read and assembled into lines in reading order.
3Pages are joined with a '--- Page Break ---' separator line so you can tell where each page ends.
4Review the result in the preview box — a character count is shown — then hit Copy for the clipboard or Download .txt for a file named after the PDF.

Common use cases

Feeding document text into scripts, search indexes, or language-analysis tools.
Copying clean, formatting-free text out of a PDF for reuse in email or a CMS.
Preparing text corpora from collections of reports or papers.
Quickly checking what a PDF's actual text content is, independent of its layout.

Frequently asked questions

Tips

Need statistics rather than the text itself? PDF Word Count reports words, characters, and lines per page without leaving the browser.
If you want HTML structure instead of raw text — for publishing rather than processing — use PDF to HTML.

100% private — runs in your browser

Convertora processes everything on your device using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Files never leave your browser, are never uploaded to a server, and are never seen by us or anyone else. The moment you close the tab, the data is gone — there is no temporary cloud copy, no log entry, no retained backup.

Because the work happens locally, processing speed depends on your device — but there are no rate limits, no daily caps, and no file size restrictions beyond what your browser can handle in memory. No signup, no account, no payment. The tool works the same in incognito mode, on a corporate network, or after the page has loaded once, even with the network disconnected.