PDF to TXT Converter

Extract all selectable text from a PDF into a plain text file. Free in your browser — no sign-up, no watermarks.

Drop your PDF files here

or click to browse — Select multiple files for batch conversion

pdf

⚡ Instant — conversion starts the moment you add files. No sign-up, no watermarks. Why FileHugger

🔍 How your file is processed

Runs: In your browser on this page
Engine: pdf.js text extraction
Max input: 512 MB per file
Your file: Processed in this browser tab — the file is not uploaded. Converted results are kept in this browser's local storage for up to two hours so their matching download page can show them; expired results are removed on the next site visit. Nothing is stored on our servers.
Good to know: Only selectable text is extracted; scanned image-only pages come out empty (use OCR PDF for those). Layout, fonts and images are not part of a .txt file.

Full security & file-privacy details →

Related converters

How to convert PDF to TXT

Click Choose files (or drag & drop) and select one or more PDF files. You can also paste an image from your clipboard.
No settings needed for this conversion — the defaults handle everything.
Press Convert to TXT. Each file is converted with a live progress indicator.
Open the download page to save your files individually or grab everything as a single ZIP.

Why convert PDF to TXT?

Need the words, not the layout? This tool pulls the embedded text out of each page so you can search it, edit it, feed it to a script or paste it anywhere. Note it extracts existing digital text — scanned image-only PDFs contain no text layer to extract (that requires OCR).

What this tool preserves — and what it changes

✓ Preserved

Unicode text exactly as the PDF maps it — the .txt is written as UTF-8, so accents, Cyrillic and CJK come out as real characters, not mojibake
Page order: text is extracted page by page, with a blank line separating pages
Your file — extraction runs on pdf.js in this tab, nothing is uploaded

↺ Changed

Layout is gone by design: fonts, columns, tables and images are not part of a .txt file — you get the words
Headers, footers and page numbers are text too, so they arrive mixed into the output
Line breaks are inferred from vertical position — a new line starts when a snippet's height on the page jumps — while snippets keep the file's internal drawing order, so multi-column or heavily designed pages can read in a different order than they appear

Known limits & edge cases

Image-only scans have no text layer — rather than handing you an empty .txt, the tool stops with a "No selectable text found" error, and the inspection card samples the first pages up front and links likely scans to OCR PDF
Encrypted PDFs are flagged by the inspection card's byte-level check in most cases — unlock them first with Unlock PDF
A few PDFs encode word spacing as positioning rather than space characters; in those files words can run together — that is how the file stores its text, not a glitch

Engine: pdf.js text extraction. These statements describe the engine as shipped on 2026-10-02 — behaviour changes are recorded in the changelog.

About the formats

What is a PDF file?

PDF is the universal document format: it locks layout, fonts and images so a file looks identical on every device and printer. Scans, invoices, forms, e-books and reports all travel as PDF. Because a PDF is a container rather than an image, turning its pages into JPG or PNG pictures — or bundling pictures into a PDF — are among the most common file tasks there are.

What is a TXT file?

TXT is plain, unformatted text — no fonts, no images, no layout, just characters. It opens on absolutely anything and is ideal for notes, logs, code and data exchange. Converting a PDF to TXT extracts its raw text for editing or searching; converting TXT to PDF produces a fixed, printable, shareable document.

PDF vs TXT at a glance

	PDF	TXT
Type	Document	Text
Compression	Mixed (per object)	None
Typical use	Documents, scans, invoices, forms	Notes, logs, raw text

Just the words, please

Locked inside most PDFs is an ordinary text layer, and often that’s all you actually want — to search a long report, quote a contract clause, feed a document into a script or a language model, or re-use copy without wrestling PDF selection quirks. This tool extracts that text layer directly into a plain .txt file: no rendering, no OCR, just the characters the PDF already contains, in reading order.

The important boundary: scanned PDFs are photographs of pages and contain no text layer, so extraction from them comes back empty. That’s the signal to use the OCR PDF tool instead, which reads the page images themselves. Layout is deliberately flattened — columns, tables and footnotes become sequential text — because plain text is the point; if you need editable formatting, PDF→Word is the neighbor to visit.

Guides for this task

Frequently asked questions

Is this PDF to TXT converter free?

Yes — completely free, with no sign-up, no watermarks and no daily quota. Processing happens in this browser, so the practical limit is the memory available on your device.

Can I convert multiple PDF files at once?

Yes. Select or drop as many files as you like — each one is converted in sequence with its own progress status, and you can download the results individually or all together as a ZIP archive.

Why is the output empty for my scanned PDF?

Scanned PDFs are photographs of pages — they contain no digital text layer to extract. This tool extracts existing text; turning scans into text requires OCR (optical character recognition), which is a different process.