What is the difference between a digital PDF and a scanned PDF?

A digital PDF has text embedded in the file — you can select and copy it in any PDF viewer. A scanned PDF is a collection of page images, usually created by scanning paper documents. Text must be recognized via OCR.

How does the tool know which method to use?

It tries native text extraction first. If the total extracted text is fewer than 50 characters, it automatically switches to OCR. The result shows a badge indicating which method was used.

Is there a page limit?

No page limit, but the file must be under 20 MB. OCR on scanned PDFs takes a few seconds per page, so very long documents may take a minute or more.

Which languages are supported?

English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), and Japanese. Select the language before extracting for best accuracy with OCR.

Will tables and formatting be preserved?

Native extraction preserves text layout reasonably well. OCR extraction produces plain text — complex table structures and formatting may not be perfectly reproduced.

Are my PDF files stored on your servers?

No. Files are processed in memory and discarded immediately after the response is returned. Nothing is saved to disk.

Can I extract text from a password-protected PDF?

No. Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked before uploading. Our tool cannot bypass PDF encryption.

What if I only need text from images, not a PDF?

Use our Image to Text (OCR) tool which works directly with PNG, JPG, WebP, and HEIC images.

Extract Text from PDF Online — Free PDF to Text Converter

Convert any PDF to editable text in seconds. For digital PDFs with embedded text, extraction is instant and perfectly accurate. For scanned PDFs, our OCR engine reads every page and extracts the text automatically. Supports 7 languages.

Drop PDF here or click to upload

PDF files up to 20 MB

Text language

How to Use the PDF to Text Converter — Extract Text from PDF Free Online

1
Upload your PDF file (up to 20 MB).
2
Select the language of the text in your PDF if it is not English.
3
Click 'Extract Text' — digital PDFs complete in under a second; scanned PDFs may take a few seconds per page.
4
Copy the extracted text or download it as a .txt file.

Why Use PDF to Text Converter — Extract Text from PDF Free Online?

PDFs are the standard for sharing documents — contracts, invoices, research papers, manuals — but the text inside is often locked and hard to work with. Our tool automatically detects whether your PDF has embedded text or is a scanned image, and picks the best extraction method. No manual selection needed.

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