Extract text from a PDF — free, no upload
Pull all the text out of a PDF in one click — copy it to the clipboard or save it as a .txt file. Extraction runs locally, so the document is never transmitted anywhere.
- ✓ No watermark
- ✓ No sign-up
- ✓ No file size limit
- ✓ Works offline
How to pdf to text
- 1Drop your PDF into the box below.
- 2The full text appears in the panel, page by page.
- 3Click ‘Copy text’ or ‘Download .txt’ — whichever suits your workflow.
Grabbing text out of a PDF is a daily chore — quoting a paragraph from a paper, feeding a contract into a translation tool, or getting clean input for a script. Select-and-copy inside PDF viewers is fiddly and often scrambles the order; this extracts everything at once.
Because pdfia reads the file in your browser rather than on a server, it's safe to use on documents you'd never paste into a random website — the text stays between you and your clipboard.
Frequently asked questions
＋ － Is my document uploaded to extract the text?
No. The text layer is read directly in your browser; neither the PDF nor its text ever reaches a server.
＋ － Does this work on scanned PDFs?
Only if the scan already contains a text layer (e.g. from OCR software). Pure image scans have no embedded text to extract — that requires OCR, which this tool doesn't perform.
＋ － Will the layout be preserved?
You get the readable text in page order with line breaks, but complex layouts (columns, tables) come out linearized — that's inherent to how PDFs store text.
＋ － Is there a size limit?
No. Hundred-page documents are fine; extraction speed depends only on your device.