How to use the PDF to Text converter
- Add one or more PDFs.
- Keep the page marker option ticked if you will need to cite page numbers later.
- Press Convert and save the .txt file.
How the text is read
Words come out in the order the PDF stores them, with a new line where the PDF breaks a line. Contracts, letters and single-column reports read cleanly. Two-column layouts and tables can run together, because a PDF records where each word is drawn rather than which column it belongs to.
The file is saved as UTF-8, so accented letters, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese and other scripts come through whenever the PDF maps its fonts to Unicode, as nearly all current PDFs do.
Scans have no text to extract
A scanned page is an image of words. When a PDF has no text layer at all, the tool tells you instead of producing an empty file; it does not perform OCR.
To check before you start, try selecting a sentence in your PDF viewer. If nothing highlights, the page is an image.
Using the output
Page markers make it easy to say where a passage came from. Switch them off when you want an unbroken run of text for a word count or for pasting the full document into another program.
The BOM option under More settings adds a small invisible marker at the start, which older Windows Notepad and Excel need to recognise UTF-8.
Questions
Are bold text, fonts or tables kept?
No. A .txt file holds characters only, with no formatting, images or table borders.
Is the PDF uploaded?
No. Text is read with pdf.js inside this tab.
The PDF is password-protected. What now?
A file that asks for a password when you open it has to go through Unlock PDF before its text can be read. Files that merely block copying are read without that step.