About this conversion
Convert PDF to TXT to get just the words — no formatting, no images, no layout. Useful when you need to feed the text into another program: search, analyse, summarise, paste into an email, or process with a script.
When this conversion is useful
- Extracting body text from a PDF report for analysis or word-counting
- Pulling content out of a contract or document for re-use elsewhere
- Preparing PDF content as input for an LLM, summariser, or search tool
- Copying a passage when the PDF's selectable-text behaviour is broken
Quality and tradeoffs
The conversion extracts text in reading order, dropping images, tables, headers/footers, and styling. Scanned PDFs (image-only) won't produce text — they need OCR first. Multi-column layouts may not extract in the visual order you'd expect.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my converted text empty?
Likely your PDF is a scanned image with no embedded text layer. You'll need OCR (optical character recognition) to extract text from image-only PDFs.
Will tables and formatting survive?
No — TXT is plain text. Tables, fonts, colours, columns, and layout are stripped. For preserving structure, convert to Markdown or HTML instead.
Does the order match the visual layout?
Mostly yes for single-column documents. Multi-column layouts (newspapers, journals) sometimes extract column-by-column rather than across the page.