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TinySolve

PDF to Text

Pull the words out of a PDF — copy them, or save them as a plain .txt file.

Runs in your browser — your files are never uploaded

Drop a PDF here

or

Up to 100 MB. The text is read on your device — the document is never uploaded.

About the PDF to Text

Copying from a PDF reader often goes wrong: line breaks land in the middle of sentences, columns interleave, and page furniture arrives mixed in with the prose. This reads the document's text layer directly and reassembles it, which gets closer to what was written.

The result is shown in full and can be copied to the clipboard or saved as a .txt file. Page markers can be left in or taken out — useful when you want to know where something came from, and unhelpful when you are feeding the text into something else.

There is an important case this tool handles by telling you the truth about it. A scanned PDF has no text in it at all: the pages are photographs, and the words are pictures of words. Nothing can copy them without optical character recognition, which is a different job and not one this does. Rather than handing you an empty file, the tool says plainly that the document appears to be scanned.

For a normal text PDF, expect nearly everything. What does not survive is layout: columns, tables and text boxes are stored as positioned fragments with no structure saying which is which, so a complex page comes out in reading order but without its shape. Simple documents come out almost exactly right.

The text is read on your device. Contracts, statements and reports are the usual subjects, and they never leave your browser.

How to use the PDF to Text

  1. Add your PDF

    Up to 100 MB. Nothing is uploaded — the text layer is read in your browser.

  2. Extract the text

    Every page is read in order and the fragments are reassembled into lines.

  3. Check the result

    Word and character counts are shown, along with how many pages had no text at all.

  4. Copy or download

    Copy it to the clipboard, or save a .txt file, with or without page markers.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there no text in my PDF?
Because it was scanned. The pages are images, so the words in them are pictures rather than characters. Extracting them needs optical character recognition, which this tool does not do — and it says so rather than handing you an empty file.
Will tables and columns come out properly?
Not reliably. A PDF stores positioned text fragments with nothing recording that a group of them is a table or a column, so a complex layout comes out in reading order without its structure. Straightforward documents come out almost exactly right.
Why is this better than copying from a PDF reader?
A reader copies whatever is selected in whatever order it was drawn, which is why pasted text so often has broken lines and interleaved columns. This reads the text layer page by page and reassembles the lines from the fragments' positions.
What are the page markers for?
They record where each page began, which matters when you need to cite or find something again. Turn them off when the text is going into something else that should not see them.
Is my document uploaded?
No. The text is read in your browser. The documents people extract text from are usually contracts, statements and reports, so nothing being transmitted is the point.

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