# PDF to Text

Copy the text out of a PDF, read it on screen and save it as .txt. Works on PDFs with a text layer, not on scans. Nothing is uploaded.

Canonical page: https://filetity.com/pdf-to-text

## Capabilities

- Free: Yes, with no watermark and no page limit.
- Account required: No. There is no account system.
- Processed on device: Yes. The file is read by your browser and never uploaded. There is no server to send it to.
- Formats: PDF in. Plain text out, on screen and as a .txt download.
- Limits: No page limit. A scanned PDF carries no text at all, and the tool says so rather than handing back an empty file.
- Mobile: Yes, on any modern mobile browser. Large files are limited by the memory the phone gives the browser.
- Offline: Yes, after you have used it once. Your browser keeps what the tool needs, so it then works with no network connection.

## Questions

### 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.

## Related tools

- [PDF to Word](https://filetity.com/pdf-to-word): Turn a PDF into an editable Word document, text and page breaks intact.
- [OCR: Image to Text](https://filetity.com/ocr): Read the text out of an image or a scanned PDF, on your own device.
- [EPUB to PDF](https://filetity.com/epub-to-pdf): Turn an EPUB ebook into a PDF, one chapter per new page.