PDF to Text
Extract all the text from a PDF into a plain .txt file you can search, edit or feed to other tools. Runs in your browser — your files are never uploaded.
or drop a file here
Up to 50 MB- 1Choose
Choose a PDF that contains selectable text.
- 2Adjust
Optionally limit the pages and choose whether to mark page breaks.
- 3Download
Click “Extract text” and download the .txt file.
All the words, none of the formatting
ShyPDF reads the text layer of the PDF and writes it to a plain .txt file: line breaks kept, pages optionally marked, everything else stripped. That is exactly what you want for feeding a document to a script, a translation tool or an AI model, for word counts, or for pasting somewhere that fights PDF formatting.
Limit the extraction to certain pages with ranges like 1-3, 5. The page-break markers make it easy to trace any line back to where it came from.
When the output comes back empty
A scanned PDF has no text layer — it is photographs of text — so there is nothing to extract. Run the scan through OCR PDF instead; it recognizes the words in the page images and can output plain text directly. And when you need structure rather than raw text — paragraphs, headings, tables — PDF to Word rebuilds an editable document.
Extraction happens in your browser. For contracts, medical records and anything else you would not paste into a random website, the file never leaves your device.
Questions
Are my files uploaded to a server?
No. Everything runs inside your browser, so your files never leave your device. Close the tab and nothing is left behind.
The output is empty or garbled. Why?
If it is empty, your PDF is probably a scan — run it through OCR PDF, which can output plain text directly. Garbled characters usually mean the PDF uses unusual font encodings; OCR PDF can often rescue those too, by reading the page image instead.
Does it keep the layout?
Line breaks are kept and pages are separated, but columns, tables and formatting are not — plain text has none. If you need the structure, use PDF to Word.