Tools / PDF Converter / PDF to Text
PDF to Text Converter
Drop in a PDF and get back plain text. Conversion happens entirely in your browser, so your file is never uploaded anywhere.
📃 Convert a PDF to Text
Click to choose a PDF, or drag and drop it here
Your file is processed locally in your browser — it is never uploaded.
How it works
We use Mozilla's PDF.js library to read each page's text directly on your device and join it into a single plain-text file, with a separator between pages. Scanned/image-only PDFs won't produce text since no OCR is performed.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I extract text from a PDF for free?
Use the Softstribe PDF to Text tool. Upload your PDF, click Convert and the tool extracts all text from every page into a plain .txt file you can download. The conversion happens in your browser — files are never uploaded.
Can I use extracted PDF text with AI tools like ChatGPT?
Yes. Extracting PDF text and pasting it into ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tools is a common use case. Plain text is faster and cheaper to process than uploading the whole PDF, and many AI tools have file size limits.
Why is my extracted text garbled or in the wrong order?
This happens with multi-column PDFs, where PDF.js reads text left-to-right across columns rather than column by column. Two-column academic papers are a common example. For simple single-column PDFs, text extraction is usually accurate.
Does the PDF to Text tool work on scanned PDFs?
No. Scanned PDFs contain images of text, not actual text data. Only digital/native PDFs (created from Word, Excel or similar) can have text extracted. For scanned PDFs you need OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software.