PDF to Text Converter — Free Online

Need to convert more than one PDF file?

This free tool converts one file at a time. Total PDF Converter does it in bulk - whole folders at once, recursively, and from the command line or a .bat script.

Batch hundreds of files in one run
Convert whole folders (recursive)
Automate from the command line or .bat

Download free trial See Total PDF Converter →

30-day free trial. $39.90 one-time. Windows 7/8/10/11.

How to convert PDF to TXT?

💾 Upload Your File: Go to the site, click on «Upload File,» and select your PDF file.

✍️ Set Conversion Options: Choose TXT as the output format and adjust any additional options if needed.

Convert and Download: Click 👉«Download Converted File»👈 to get your TXT file.

Cloud Based

Convert PDF to TXT without Microsoft Office or any editor. Upload the document in your browser and download the TXT in seconds, on any device.

Secure

Documents can include personal and business information. Your PDF upload is encrypted in transit with HTTPS/TLS and processed in data centers with multi-factor access control during the conversion to TXT.

Ease of Use

Converting PDF to plain text online has never been so simple. Drop your .pdf and the converter extracts the full text — preserving UTF-8 encoding, paragraph breaks, and multi-column reading order — and delivers a clean .txt file in seconds. Works with regular PDFs, password-free protected documents, and scanned PDFs via built-in OCR. No Adobe Acrobat, no Python scripts required.

Privacy

The contents of your PDF are never read or reused. After the conversion to TXT, both files are deleted automatically from our servers. Privacy Policy.

PDF File

File extension	.PDF
Category	Document File
Description	Adobe Systems Portable Document Format (PDF) format provides all the contents of a printed document in electronic form, including text and images, as well as technical details like links, scales, graphs, and interactive content. You can open this file in free Acrobat Reader and scroll through the page or the entire document, which is generally one or more pages. The PDF format is used to save pre-designed periodicals, brochures, and flyers.
Associated programs	Adobe Viewer Ghostscript Ghostview Xpdf CoolUtils PDF Viewer
Developed by	Adobe Systems
MIME type	application/pdf application/x-pdf
Useful links	More detailed information on PDF files
Conversion type	PDF to TXT

TXT File

File extension	.TXT, .TEXT
Category	Document File
Description	TXT format is the simplest text file standard that doesn’t support formatting. Such file contains text characters, tab and line feed characters. Being outdated in functionality it has one major advantage - compact file size, comfortable for sharing, data export/import. It supports various charsets (DOS, WIN, ISO, KOI-8). The charset can be changed to make TXT file compatible with any text reader. The lack of formatting is solved by setting up format params in the reader program.
Associated programs	Notepad TextEdit WordPad
Developed by	Various
MIME type
Useful links

2026-02-03

We pipe quarterly financial reports through an NLP pipeline and needed clean plain text. This converter strips formatting reliably and preserves paragraph breaks better than any other tool I tried.

Svetlana Petrenko

2026-04-19

Had a batch of locked PDFs from a vendor — couldn't copy text from them in Acrobat. This tool extracted everything in seconds and the output was accurate.

Rodrigo Mendes

2026-05-11

Data mining research papers in bulk — this handles 500 PDFs at once and outputs individual .txt files named after the originals. Exactly what a data pipeline needs.

Priya Subramaniam

Rating PDF to TXT

4.7 (890 votes)Rate It

PDF to Text Converter — Frequently Asked Questions ▼

How can I convert a PDF file to text?

Upload the PDF to the converter at the top of this page and click Convert. It decodes the font encoding, sorts the text objects into reading order, and writes everything into a plain UTF-8 .txt file you can download in seconds. Scanned pages go through OCR automatically.

Can ChatGPT convert PDF to text?

It can read a PDF you attach and retype or summarise what it finds, but it is not a converter: long documents get truncated, line breaks and layout are not preserved, tables are reflowed, and the model may paraphrase instead of copying. A converter extracts the text of every page verbatim, keeps the reading order, and hands back a file rather than a chat answer.

What is the best PDF to text converter?

It depends on the PDF. When the document already has a text layer, almost anything works, including the free pdftotext utility from the Poppler package on the command line. When the PDF is a scan, you need OCR: this converter has it built in, takes files up to 50 MB, and needs no installation or account. For whole folders of documents, the desktop Total PDF Converter does the same job offline.

How can I convert a PDF file to TXT for free?

This page is free — no signup, no watermark, no page cap, 50 MB per file. Upload the PDF, click Convert, download the .txt. Nothing is installed on your computer, and the uploaded file is deleted from the server after the conversion.

What encoding does the TXT file use?

UTF-8 without a byte order mark, which Notepad, VS Code, Python, grep and virtually every other text tool read correctly. Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and CJK characters survive the conversion, and mixed-language documents are extracted in a single pass.

Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?

A PDF that merely restricts printing or copying is processed normally. A PDF that asks for a password before it will open is encrypted, and it has to be unlocked in your PDF reader first — the converter does not bypass passwords.

Quick answer: Upload your PDF to the CoolUtils online converter above, click Convert, and download a plain .txt file seconds later. It maps every glyph to Unicode, keeps paragraph breaks and multi-column reading order, and runs OCR when the page is a scan. The output is UTF-8 text you can search, edit or index. Free, no install, no signup.

A PDF stores words as positioned glyphs rather than as a stream of sentences. That is why copy-paste out of a two-column report comes back scrambled, and why a scanned page yields nothing at all. Text extraction rebuilds the reading order and returns the whole document as one .txt file — no page cap, no watermark, and nothing left on the server after you download it.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Yes. A scanned PDF has no text layer at all, only a picture of the page, so the converter runs OCR (optical character recognition) on those pages and writes what it recognises into the .txt file. Accuracy is highest on clean scans at 300 DPI or above; a crooked phone photo of a page will need proofreading afterwards. A PDF that asks for a password before it opens has to be unlocked first.

Feature	Online Converters	CoolUtils Desktop	Adobe Editor	Other Software
Batch Conversion	Limited	✅ Unlimited	Manual only	Limited
File Size Limit	1-5MB	✅ No limits	System dependent	Varies
Privacy & Security	Upload required	✅ 100% offline	✅ Local only	Varies
Conversion Speed	Internet dependent	✅ Fast local processing	Slow	Medium
Advanced Options	Basic	✅ Full customization	Limited	Basic
Cost	Free/Premium	One-time purchase	Requires Office	Subscription
Formatting Preservation	Good	✅ Excellent	Good	Varies
Multiple Formats Support	Limited	✅ 40+ formats	Few formats	Limited