filetity

PDF -> TXT · Local tool

PDF to Text

Pull the text out of a PDF, page by page, and copy it or save it as .txt.

Last updated

  1. 01 / Your device

    the file stays here

  2. 02 / Browser memory

    the work runs locally

  3. 03 / Back to you

    saved on this device

When you would use this

Situations, not settings.

Quoting from a report
Copying out of a PDF viewer drags in line breaks and column order. This gives you the text page by page, ready to paste.
Searching a document your reader will not search
Save it as .txt and use the search you already trust, rather than a viewer that stops at the first match.
Feeding a document to something else
Plain text is what scripts and language models want. Extracting once beats pasting page by page.

How it works / no cloud

A conversion engine, not an upload form.

A PDF stores its text as positioned characters, and filetity reads those characters straight out of the file in browser memory with pdf.js, the engine Firefox uses to display PDFs. Nothing is re-rendered and nothing is recognised: what you get is the text the file already carried. There is no account, queue, watermark, or remote server in the path.

  • Offline ready
  • Installable app
  • No file limit queue

Straight answers

No accordion. Nothing hidden.

Is it free?
Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
Does it need an account?
No. There is no account system.
Is my file processed on my device?
Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
What formats are supported?
PDF in. Plain text out, on screen and as a .txt download.
What are the limits?
No page limit. A scanned PDF carries no text at all, and the tool says so rather than handing back an empty file.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
Does it work offline?
Yes, after you have used it once. Your browser keeps what the tool needs, so it then works with no network connection.
Why does it say my PDF has no text?
Because it has none. A scan, or a photo of a document, is a picture of text: the PDF holds an image and there are no characters behind it. This tool copies text a file already carries, so on that file there is nothing to copy.
Can it read a scanned PDF?
Not this tool. Reading letters out of a picture is OCR, a different job that needs a different engine, and this tool only copies text a file already carries. A scan gets told plainly that there is no text layer, with a pointer to the OCR tool, which does read scans.
Does the layout survive?
Line breaks do, and each page starts with its own marker so you can see where the pages were. Columns, tables and text boxes come out in the order the PDF stores them, which is not always the order a person reads them in.
Can I get the text of one page only?
Every page comes out, each under its own page marker, so the part you want is easy to find. To work on a single page on its own, extract that page first and read the text out of the result.
Can it read a password-protected PDF?
No. The file is refused when you drop it, with a message to remove the password. Do that with the Unlock PDF tool, if you know the password, and bring the result here.

How this one works

Keep working locally

7 available · more coming