Converting a PDF to plain text strips all formatting and gives you the raw text content — useful for importing into databases, processing with code, or pasting into other applications. Here is how to do it for free.
Go to pdfeditor.onl/convert-pdf. No sign-up required. Upload your PDF by clicking the upload area or dragging the file in.
Choose Plain Text (.txt) from the output format options. The converter extracts all text content from the PDF's text streams in reading order.
Tip: Plain text conversion works best for digitally created PDFs. For scanned PDFs, run OCR first at pdfeditor.onl/ocr-pdf to create a text layer, then convert to .txt.
Click Convert & Download. The .txt file contains all extracted text with line breaks preserved. Open it in any text editor — Notepad (Windows), TextEdit (Mac), Gedit (Linux), or VS Code.
Use cases for PDF to TXT: feeding document text into AI tools or language models, importing contract text into a contract management system, extracting data for analysis, or creating a text index for search.
No. Plain text (.txt) strips all formatting — bold, italic, tables, columns — leaving only the raw characters. For formatting preservation, convert to .docx instead.
Text is extracted in the order it appears in the PDF's content stream, which usually corresponds to reading order. Multi-column layouts may mix column text — manual cleanup may be needed.