PDF to Text Converter
Extract text from any PDF online, including scanned and image-only PDFs. OCR reads every page, so you get text you can copy or download as .txt.
Supported formats: PDF
Up to 5 files, 3 MB each
Features
- Extract text from scanned PDF documents
- Works with multi-page PDFs
- Preserves text structure and formatting
- Image-only PDFs work too: phone scans, faxes and photos saved as PDF
- Free for files up to 3 MB
About PDF to Text Converter
Our PDF to text converter uses advanced OCR technology to extract editable text from any PDF file. Whether your document is a text-based PDF or a scanned image, our tool analyzes every page and converts the content into plain text that you can copy, edit, and reuse. This is particularly useful for students working with academic papers, professionals handling contracts and invoices, or anyone who needs to quickly pull text from a PDF without installing desktop software.
Scanned and image-only PDFs
A PDF made by a scanner, a phone scanning app or a fax machine holds a picture of each page, not text. That is why you can't select or copy anything in it, and why searching it finds nothing. Scanned and native PDFs look the same on screen, so this often comes as a surprise.
You don't need to know which kind you have. Every PDF you upload here is read with OCR page by page, whether it was scanned or exported from Word, and you get the text of all its pages in one result. So converting an image-only PDF to text is no different from any other PDF.
Getting a clean result from a scan
- Scan at 300 DPI or more. Low-resolution scans lose small print and punctuation.
- Keep pages straight and flat. Skewed or curled pages break lines apart.
- Check names, numbers and anything in a table against the original before you rely on them.
- If the PDF is mostly tables, PDF to Excel keeps the rows and columns. This page returns plain text.
How pages are counted
Each page counts as 1 token. You have 10 tokens a day, with or without an account, so a 20-page scan needs two days or a paid plan. The file can be up to 3 MB, so a long, high-resolution scan may need splitting into smaller files first.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, our tool uses OCR technology to recognize and extract text from scanned PDF documents, even if the text is embedded as an image.
It is probably a scanned or image-only PDF: each page is a picture, with no text inside. Upload it here and OCR reads the picture of each page and gives you the text.
Yes, the converter processes all pages of your PDF and combines the extracted text into a single output.
Yes, once extracted, you can copy the text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file for editing in any text editor.
You can upload PDF files up to 3 MB in size for free conversion.