How to Convert PDF to Text Online for Free (Including Scanned PDFs)

You need the words from a PDF: a quote for a report, figures from an invoice, notes from a lecture, the text of a contract to search. Selecting and copying in a PDF viewer often goes wrong. Lines break in odd places, columns get mixed together, and scanned pages refuse to select at all. This guide shows how to use a free PDF to text converter online to get clean, editable text, how to handle scanned pages with OCR, and how to turn text back into a PDF.

How to Convert PDF to Text Online for Free

The whole job takes a few clicks, and nothing needs to be installed. It works the same way on a computer, a tablet or a phone browser.

1. Add your PDF. Open the PDF to Text converter and select Select PDF file, or drag the file onto the page. You can also import from Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive. The page thumbnails appear straight away, and each page is marked Text or No text. No text usually means a scanned page.
2. Choose the pages. Keep All pages, or switch to Choose pages and click pages or type a selection such as 1-3, 7. The selection is checked against the real page count before anything is sent.
3. Pick the options you need. Turn on OCR for scanned pages if any page has no text; it is switched on for you when scanned pages are found. Choose the OCR language, and change Reading order if the PDF has columns.
4. Select Extract Text. A progress bar shows the upload, then the pages are read one by one. You can cancel at any time.
5. Review, then copy or download. The text appears in an editable box with page, word and character counts. A Needs attention list names any pages that came back empty, garbled or uncertain. Select Copy text to paste it anywhere, or Download .txt to save a UTF-8 text file named after your PDF.

Two output options change the text instantly without extracting again. Join lines into paragraphs removes the line breaks a PDF puts at the end of every printed line, which suits Word documents and emails. Page separators marks where each page starts.

What Is a PDF to Text Converter?

Most PDFs created from Word, Google Docs or a website store their text as real characters, along with the font and the exact position of each word. A PDF to text converter reads those characters and writes them out as plain text, in reading order, without the fonts, colours or layout.

That is different from a full conversion to Word, which tries to rebuild the page layout. Text extraction is simpler and more reliable: you get exactly the words in the document, ready to search, quote, translate, analyse or paste into another program. What you give up is the look of the page.

A PDF to text converter cannot find text that is not there as characters. A scanned page or a photo of a document is a picture, so the converter sees an image and no words. Reading those pages needs OCR, covered next.

How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF

When you scan paper or photograph a page, the PDF stores an image of it. You can read it, but the computer cannot: there is nothing to select, search or copy. Optical character recognition (OCR) looks at the image, finds lines of text, and recognises each character.

In PDFCherry’s converter:

• Scanned pages are detected before you extract. Pages without selectable text are marked No text, and OCR is switched on for them automatically. Pages that already have text are read directly, which is faster and exact.
• OCR runs in your browser. The page images never leave your device. The recognition engine and the language file download from this site the first time you use them, so the first run takes a little longer.
• Choose the document’s language. English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian and Hindi are available. The right language noticeably improves accents and special letters.
• Progress is shown page by page, and you can cancel. Pages where recognition was uncertain are listed under Needs attention so you know what to proofread.

What affects OCR accuracy. OCR is never 100% accurate. Clean, straight scans at around 300 DPI with dark text on a light background give the best results. Expect mistakes with faint or blurry scans, skewed pages, very small print, decorative fonts, text over pictures, tables and handwriting, which OCR reads poorly. Always check names, numbers and amounts against the original.

OCR on long documents takes time, especially on phones. If you only need a few pages, select just those pages first.

How to Convert Text to PDF Online

Sometimes you need the reverse: a plain text file turned into a tidy PDF you can print, share or attach. The online Text to PDF converter does that.

1. Add your text. Select a .txt file. If you just extracted text with PDF to Text, select Turn this text into a PDF on the results screen instead: Text to PDF opens with your text, including any edits, already loaded. To start from typed text, save it as a .txt file in any text editor first.
2. Choose the page size. A4 (210 × 297 mm) is standard in most countries; Letter (8.5 × 11 in) is standard in the US and Canada.
3. Choose the font size. Small (9 pt) fits more on each page, Normal (11 pt) is comfortable for reading, and Large (13 pt) is easier on the eyes.
4. Convert and download. Long lines wrap to the page width and continue onto new pages, so no text is cut off at the edges. Blank lines are kept. The result screen shows the page count before you download.

The PDF uses a standard sans-serif font with 0.75-inch margins in portrait orientation. It supports Latin-script text, which covers English and most Western European languages. Characters the font cannot show, such as Hindi, Chinese or emoji, are replaced with a question mark, so check the PDF if your text uses other scripts.

PDF to Text vs. OCR: What’s the Difference?

Both give you text, but they work in different ways and suit different files.

A simple test: try to select a word in your PDF viewer. If it highlights, the page has text and extraction will work. If you can only draw a box over a picture, the page needs OCR. Many PDFs mix both, such as a typed report with a scanned signature page, and the converter handles each page the right way.

What Happens to Tables, Images, and Formatting?

Plain text has no formatting, so a PDF to text conversion keeps the words and drops the design:

• Kept: the words, their order, paragraph breaks, and line breaks if you want them.
• Removed: fonts, bold and italics, colours, page layout, images, charts, and links.
• Tables become rows of text. Cells in a row usually stay on one line separated by spaces, but there are no columns or borders. For neat tables, paste the rows into a spreadsheet and split them, or re-create the table.
• Columns may be read across instead of down. Switch Reading order between As stored and Top to bottom and extract again to see which reads better.
• Headers, footers and page numbers are part of the page text, so they appear in the output. Turn on Page separators to see where each page ends, then delete repeats in the text box.

If you need pictures of the pages rather than the words, use PDF to JPG.

How to Extract Text from Specific PDF Pages

You rarely need all 300 pages of a report. Extracting only the pages you need is faster and gives you less text to clean up. Select Choose pages, then click page thumbnails or type a selection:

If the selection includes a page the PDF does not have, the converter says how many pages the document has, so you can fix it before extracting. To keep the selected pages as a smaller PDF rather than as text, use Extract PDF Pages.

Common PDF to Text Problems and How to Fix Them

Is It Safe to Extract Text from a PDF Online?

It is sensible to ask before you upload a contract or a bank statement. Here is exactly what happens in PDFCherry’s PDF to Text converter:

• When you add a PDF, it is opened in your browser to show the pages. Nothing is uploaded yet.
• When you select Extract Text, the PDF (and its password, if it has one) is sent over HTTPS to our server. The selected pages are read, and the uploaded file is deleted before the text is sent back. The extracted text is not stored.
• OCR runs entirely in your browser, so scanned page images never leave your device.
• The content of your documents and their passwords are never written to logs.
• Text to PDF works differently: your text file is processed on our server and deleted automatically within 30 minutes, and the generated PDF is kept for up to 60 minutes so you can download it, then removed automatically.

No online service is the right place for every document. For highly confidential files, follow your organisation’s rules. Read our Privacy Policy for details.

Frequently Asked Questions

Summary

To convert PDF to text online, add the PDF, choose the pages, and extract. Copy the result or download a .txt file. Pages marked No text are scans and need OCR, which runs in your browser. Use Join lines into paragraphs for clean pasting and switch Reading order for columns. To go the other way, Text to PDF turns plain text into a paginated A4 or Letter PDF.