PDF to text
Pull the words out of a PDF into a plain text file. This reads the document's real text layer, so it is exact rather than a guess — but it cannot read a scan.
How to pdf to text
- Drop in a PDF.
- Choose one text file for the whole document, or one file per page if you are processing chapters separately.
- Optionally restrict it to a page range.
- Press Extract text.
Why this one is different
Almost every free file tool works the same way: you upload your file to a company's server, their machine does the work, and you download the result. That means a copy of your document sat on someone else's hard drive, governed by a privacy policy you did not read.
Filebench does the work in the browser tab you are already looking at. There is no upload step because there is no server to upload to. The practical consequences: no file size limit, no queue, no account, no watermark, and it keeps working if your connection drops after the page loads.
| Filebench | Typical online converter | |
|---|---|---|
| Your file leaves your device | Never | Every time |
| File size limit | None | Often 10–100 MB free |
| Sign-up required | No | Usually, past a few files |
| Watermark on output | No | Sometimes |
| Works offline after loading | Yes | No |
Questions
It says no text was found. Why?
Your PDF is almost certainly a scan — a photograph of a page rather than a document containing text. There is no text layer to extract. Reading it would need OCR, which recognises letter shapes in an image, and this tool does not do OCR. It says so plainly rather than handing you an empty file.
How do I tell whether my PDF has real text?
Open it in any PDF reader and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If it highlights word by word, there is a text layer and this tool will extract it. If nothing selects, or the whole page highlights as one block, it is a scan.
Will the layout be preserved?
No. You get the words in reading order, with line breaks where the PDF marks them. Columns, tables and text boxes are flattened into a single stream. Plain text has no way to represent a layout, so anything depending on position is lost.
Is it accurate?
For a real text layer, yes — the characters come from the document itself, not from image recognition, so there are no misread letters. Spacing between runs is inferred and can occasionally be off inside heavily styled text.
Can I get the text as Word or Markdown instead?
Not here. Faithful PDF-to-Word conversion means reconstructing layout, styles and tables, which needs far more than a browser can reasonably do. Plain text is the part that can be done exactly, so that is what is offered.
Other tools
Convert images
Swap between PNG, JPG and WEBP in bulk. Choose a background colour when converting transparent images to JPG.
Compress images
Cut image weight with a quality slider and an optional size cap. Each result shows the percentage saved.
Resize images
Resize by width, height, exact dimensions or percentage — in bulk, with the aspect ratio kept.