PDF to Text: Extract Text from Any PDF
Copy-pasting from a PDF gives you broken lines and garbage characters. Get the whole document as a clean, plain text file instead, with OCR fallback for scanned pages.
or drop a file here · free, no signup, files deleted automatically
How to convert PDF to text
- Upload your PDF (drag & drop or browse).
- Choose Extract Text. Toggle “preserve line breaks” to taste.
- Download the .txt file. Your PDF is deleted from our server automatically.
Why use Forge Files?
- Works on scans: OCR fallback recognizes text in scanned documents that normal extractors return empty.
- Verifiably private: automatic deletion after download, with the full source code on GitHub to prove it.
- Free and anonymous: no signup, no watermark, no limits.
Get clean, plain text out of a PDF
PDF to Text extracts the words from a PDF into a simple .txt
file: no formatting, no images, just the text ready to search, paste, or feed
into another tool. It's ideal for quoting a document, copying content that a
PDF viewer won't let you select, or preparing text for analysis.
Scanned documents
If the PDF is a scan or photo, the words are really an image. An OCR (optical character recognition) fallback, running fully offline on our server, reads the pixels and recovers the text. Need to keep layout and edit it instead of plain text? Use PDF to Word.
Is the PDF to Text tool private?
Yes. Your file is uploaded over encrypted HTTPS, processed, handed back, and then deleted — the upload goes the moment the PDF to Text operation finishes and the result the instant you download it, with an hourly sweeper as a backstop. Unlike closed tools that just claim they don't keep your files, Forge Files's code is fully open source, so you can verify exactly how the PDF to Text tool handles your data — or self-host it. No account, no watermark, no upsell. See our privacy details for the full picture.
Frequently asked questions
Can I extract text from a scanned PDF?
Yes, when the PDF has no embedded text layer, the OCR fallback recognizes the text from the page images, where available on the server.
Will the text keep its formatting?
Your choice: preserve line breaks and spacing to mirror the document, or disable it for continuous text that's easier to paste elsewhere.
What output do I get?
A plain .txt file: perfect for searching, quoting, summarizing, or feeding into other tools.
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