PDF to TXT Converter

A PDF doesn't store a paragraph of text the way a text editor does. It stores the shape and position of every individual character on the page, the way a printer places ink. To pull readable text back out, this tool reads that position data one page at a time, using the same open-source engine that renders PDFs inside Firefox.

For each page, every character's coordinates are collected and grouped into rows based on how far down the page they sit. Within a row, the characters are sorted left to right and joined into a line. Stack those lines from top to bottom and repeat for every page, and the result reads close to the original layout for normal, single-column documents such as letters, reports, or articles.

This method has one clear limit: it only works on PDFs that already contain real, selectable text. A scanned page is really a photograph saved inside a PDF, with no character data behind it, so there's nothing for this tool to read. Recognising text in a scanned image needs a separate process called OCR, which isn't part of what this tool does — trying to run untrusted scripts against a scanned page on a server would also be a security risk, so this stays a pure text-layer extractor.

Every step happens on your device. The PDF is opened, read, and converted in your browser, then it's gone the moment you close the tab. Nothing is uploaded, so the file and its contents stay private throughout.