Convert PDF to Text Online (.txt)

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Total PDF Converter To Convert PDF files

Convert PDF Files in Batch!;
Convert PDF to TXT and in many other formats
Convert thousands of files in 3 clicks;
Have a desktop converter that works without Internet;
No need to send your files to the web;
Get more accurate output with the more poweful engine.

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Total PDF Converter

Total PDF Converter supports PDF, PS, EPS, PRN, XPS, OXPS files. It's not a simple PRN converter, it's the all-in-one solution. New formats are constantly being added.

Tell Total PDF Converter if you want to omit images from the source files. You can also get the new file with images only without text if you like.

Convert PDF to PDF/A in batch. Update thousands of files in one process.

Total PDF Converter can act as a PDF splitting utility and extract selected pages from a multi-page PDF. It can also split PDF by bookmarks or by blank pages.

Total PDF Converter will change the date of the file or keep the original time stamps. Just check the appropriate checkbox.

Sign PDF documents with your digital signature during the file conversion process.

Combine several PDF files into one multi-page document with out powerful batch PDF converter.

Total PDF Converter can automatically rotate your documents.

PDF to Word converter supports both Doc and DOCX for your convenience.

Convert PDF to JPG? Customize the final image to your needs. Set the desired quality of the JPEG image to compromize the file size. The app also extracts selected pages and converts them to JPEG.

Convert PDF/PS/EPS/PRN files via our clear interface with lots of hints for beginners.

The widest list of output file types: DOC, DOCX, RTF, XLS, HTML, BMP, JPEG, GIF, WMF, EMF, PNG, EPS, PS, TIFF, TXT, CSV, PDF/A and PDF!

Total PDF Converter can combine several PDF files into one TIFF image. Or place every page of a multi-page PDF into a new TIFF files.

Tune the output: set new margins in inches to your standards (ready for printing).

Each PDF file is displayed in Preview panel. You can zoom it in/out or view the document full-sized. Preview option makes it easy to find the necessary PDF file.

Add text or image watermarks to the header or the footer of the output file. It's perfect for stamping bates too!

Want more order? Add pagination (sequential numbering of folders is available).

Total PDF Converter can extract odd or even pages for you.

Unlike free PDF converters, our app processes thousands of documents keeping the folder stucture.

No matter what MS Office you have, our app can convert PDF to DOC and DocX.

We also offer PDF Converter SDK for Web\SQL server\ASP\.NET\C#. With ActiveX you can easily implement our PDF converter into your application and redistribute it to the end users.

Total PDF Converter has full command line support (get the ready-to-use command line from GUI).

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 TXT Converter — Frequently Asked Questions ▼

How do I convert a PDF to TXT?

Upload your PDF to the converter, wait a few seconds for processing, then click Download to get your .txt file. The converter extracts all text from the document — paragraphs, headings, table cells — and saves it as UTF-8 plain text.

Does the converter work with scanned PDFs?

Yes. The converter includes OCR (optical character recognition) that reads image-based pages and turns them into selectable, searchable text. Accuracy is highest on clean, high-resolution scans at 300 DPI or above.

What encoding is the output TXT file?

Output is UTF-8 without BOM by default, which is compatible with Notepad, VS Code, Python, and virtually every text-processing tool. Non-Latin characters — Cyrillic, Arabic, CJK, Hebrew — are preserved correctly.

Will the layout and formatting be preserved?

PDF to TXT strips most visual formatting (fonts, colors, images) because plain text has no equivalent. Paragraph breaks and reading order are preserved. For a file that keeps tables as aligned columns, try PDF to CSV or PDF to XLS instead.

Can I convert multi-page PDFs?

Yes. All pages are extracted and concatenated into a single .txt file, with a page break marker between pages so you can split them programmatically if needed.

What is the maximum file size?

The online converter accepts PDF files up to 50 MB. For larger files or batch conversion of hundreds of PDFs at once, use the desktop Total PDF Converter — it handles unlimited file sizes and folders.

Is my PDF secure during conversion?

Your file is uploaded over an encrypted HTTPS connection and automatically deleted from the server after conversion. Nothing is stored permanently or shared with third parties.

Why use TXT instead of other formats?

Plain text is universal — every programming language, database, and operating system reads it. It is the preferred input format for NLP pipelines, log analysis tools, legal discovery databases (Relativity, Logikcull), and search indexing. If you need the text for further processing rather than reading, TXT is the simplest output.

Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?

The converter can process PDFs that restrict printing or editing but do not require a password to open. If the file requires a password to open (encrypted PDF), you will need to remove the password first using your PDF reader.

What if the PDF contains multiple languages?

UTF-8 encoding handles all languages simultaneously. Mixed-language documents — English with embedded Chinese, Arabic, or Russian sections — are extracted correctly as long as the original PDF embeds the fonts or provides sufficient character metadata.

Why can't I copy text from my PDF?

Three common reasons. The PDF may set a copy-restriction flag that readers obey — the converter processes such files normally as long as no password is required to open them. The PDF may be a scan with no text layer at all — OCR, built into this converter, is the only way to get text out of it. Or the PDF uses non-standard font encoding, so copied text turns into garbage characters; extraction with proper character mapping usually recovers it.

Is there a really free PDF to text converter without watermarks or page limits?

This one: no signup, no watermark, no per-page cap — the only limit is 50 MB per file. Command-line users can also try pdftotext from the free Poppler package; it is excellent for PDFs with a text layer but has no OCR, so scanned documents come out empty. For scans, use this converter (OCR included), and for bulk folders use the desktop Total PDF Converter.

Convert PDF to TXT — Extract Plain Text from Any PDF

PDFs lock text inside a fixed-layout container — you can read it on screen, but you can't paste it cleanly into a text editor, search it with grep, feed it to an NLP pipeline, or index it in a database. Converting PDF to TXT extracts the full text content as plain UTF-8: paragraphs, headings, tables, footnotes — everything the PDF contains, in readable order, in a plain .txt file you can use anywhere. Drop your .pdf above and download extracted text in seconds.

How PDF Text Extraction Works

A PDF document stores text as glyph streams with position coordinates — not as a linear sequence of words. The converter reads the content stream, maps glyphs to Unicode characters using the PDF's embedded font encoding tables, sorts text objects by reading order (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, with column detection for multi-column layouts), and writes the result as UTF-8 plain text.

For scanned PDFs — documents created by scanning a paper page — there is no text layer at all, only a raster image. These require OCR (optical character recognition) to produce text output. The online converter includes built-in OCR for scanned pages, so both native-text PDFs and scanned documents are supported. Password-protected PDFs cannot be processed until the password is removed.

PDF vs TXT — Format Comparison

Property	PDF	TXT (plain text)
Layout fidelity	Exact (fixed layout)	None — text only
Searchable with grep/regex	No	Yes
Editable in Notepad/VS Code	No	Yes
Ingestible by NLP/ML pipelines	Requires extraction	Yes — directly
Database indexing	Requires extraction	Yes
File size	Larger (layout + fonts)	Minimal
Images preserved	Yes	No
Font/formatting	Preserved visually	Stripped

When Do You Need PDF to TXT Conversion?

Full-text search and indexing: Search engines, Elasticsearch clusters, and document management systems index plain text, not PDF layout streams. Converting to TXT enables full-text search across thousands of documents without PDF parsing libraries.
NLP and machine learning: Training datasets, sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and summarization pipelines consume plain text. PDF-to-TXT is the standard pre-processing step before feeding documents to any language model or text classifier.
Legal eDiscovery: Contract review platforms, Relativity, and other eDiscovery tools process text for keyword searching and tagging. Extracted TXT files are smaller, faster to process, and easier to diff than PDFs.
Data extraction from reports: Financial statements, bank exports, and government reports in PDF can be converted to TXT and then parsed with scripts to extract tables, numbers, and structured data.

Editing scanned documents: A PDF from a scanner or fax machine contains only an image. OCR-based PDF-to-TXT extracts the text so it can be corrected, formatted, and repurposed in a word processor.
Accessibility: Screen readers work best with plain text. Converting inaccessible PDFs to TXT enables visually impaired users to consume document content through text-to-speech tools.
Log file recovery: Application logs and system reports exported as PDF by monitoring tools can be converted back to TXT for analysis with grep, awk, or log parsers.
Translation pipelines: CAT tools (SDL Trados, memoQ, DeepL API) accept plain text and DOCX. Converting PDF to TXT is the first step in a document translation workflow.

Online vs Desktop: PDF to TXT

Feature	Online (this page)	Total PDF Converter
File size limit	50 MB	No limit — handles large multi-hundred-page PDFs
Batch conversion	One PDF at a time	Entire folder trees in a single run
Software required	No	Windows install
OCR for scanned PDFs	Yes (built-in, automatic)	Yes — with per-language model selection
Page range selection	Full document only	Custom ranges, e.g. pages 5–20
Encoding of output TXT	UTF-8	UTF-8 or user-specified code page
Automation / CLI	No	Yes
Price	Free	From $49.90

Command-Line Batch Conversion

The desktop Total PDF Converter extracts text from entire PDF folders in one command:

TotalPDFConverter.exe C:\Reports\*.pdf /txt /out C:\Text_Output\

Add /ocr to enable optical character recognition on scanned pages, /pages 1-3 to pull only the executive summary from multi-hundred-page reports, or /lang fr to switch the OCR model to French for francophone document archives. The extracted TXT files are UTF-8 encoded and ready for grep, Python text pipelines, or Elasticsearch ingestion. Wrap the command in a .bat file and schedule with Windows Task Scheduler to process new PDF drops nightly — useful for automated NLP pre-processing and full-text indexing workflows.

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