What you can do with the text
- Edit or reuse wording from a PDF that you can’t edit directly
- Search a long document, or many documents, with any text tool
- Paste into an email, spreadsheet, translator or AI assistant
- Copy text from PDFs where selecting and copying gives jumbled results
- Archive documents as small, future-proof plain text
How to use it
- Optionally type which pages to extract. Leave it empty for the whole document.
- Choose your PDF or drop it on the box above.
- Download the
.txtfile. The note shows how many characters were found.
Which PDFs work
There are two kinds of PDF, and they look the same on screen:
| Kind | Made by | Extract text? |
|---|---|---|
| Text-based | Word, Google Docs, web browsers, most software | Yes, accurately |
| Image-based | Scanners, phone scanning apps, photos | No, the pages are pictures |
A quick test: try selecting a word in your PDF viewer. If you can highlight individual words, the PDF has real text. If you can only select the whole page as a picture, it’s a scan.
How the text is laid out
The converter follows the line breaks stored in the PDF and removes stray spaces at line ends. When you extract several pages, each starts with a --- Page N --- marker so you can find your place. Hyphenated words at line ends stay hyphenated, as in the original.
Tables come out as text in rows, with columns separated by spaces rather than aligned. For tables you want in a spreadsheet, a dedicated PDF to Excel or CSV converter is planned.
Encoding
The text file is saved as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, so special characters, accents and non-Latin scripts display correctly even in older Windows editors that otherwise guess the encoding wrong.
Privacy
Many PDFs people extract text from are contracts, statements and reports. Here the PDF is opened by pdf.js, Mozilla’s PDF engine, inside your browser. The document and its text never leave your device.
Questions
Why is the text file empty, or why do I get "no text found"?
The PDF is a scan or photo of pages. It contains pictures of text rather than text itself, so there is nothing to extract. Text recognition (OCR) is needed for those, which xconverter plans to add.
Is the formatting kept?
No. A TXT file holds plain text only, so fonts, bold, colours, images and tables are lost. Line breaks are kept, and pages are separated with a "Page" heading.
Why are some lines in a strange order?
PDFs store text in the order it was drawn, not always reading order. Multi-column layouts, sidebars and tables can come out interleaved. Single-column documents convert cleanly.
Will accented and non-English characters work?
Yes. The file is saved as UTF-8, which supports every language. It opens correctly in Notepad, TextEdit and any modern editor.
Last reviewed 31 October 2026