MarkdownPDF

PDF to Text Converter

Get the plain text out of any PDF — including scanned ones, thanks to built-in OCR in seven languages. Free, no sign-up, and your file never leaves your browser.

Drop your PDF here, or browse

Processed on your device — never uploaded

Plain text, or something better?

Plain text is the lowest common denominator, and sometimes exactly right: you want the words to paste into a form, feed to a script, or search with grep. This tool keeps paragraphs together, joins lines that the layout had wrapped, de-hyphenates words split across lines, and leaves headings and list items on their own lines so the result stays scannable.

What plain text cannot keep is structure. A heading becomes an ordinary line; a list loses its markers; emphasis disappears. If the document is going into notes, documentation, a wiki or an AI tool, that structure is what makes it usable — which is what the PDF to Markdown converter preserves, using the same extraction and the same OCR.

Scanned pages

A scanned PDF has no text to extract: each page is an image. The converter detects those pages and runs OCR on them automatically, so a mixed document — a few typed pages, a few scanned — comes out whole. If the results disappoint, the scan is usually the cause rather than the engine; the scanned PDF guide explains what to fix and in what order.

Frequently asked questions

How do I extract text from a PDF?

Drop the PDF into the converter above. The text layer is read page by page, pages without one are recognised with OCR, and the result appears in an editable box you can copy or download as a .txt file. Nothing is uploaded.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Yes. A page with no text layer is detected and run through OCR automatically. Pick the language of your scans under the drop zone: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic.

Text or Markdown — which should I choose?

Plain text is right when you want the words and nothing else: pasting into a form, a script, a subtitle file. Markdown is better when the structure matters — headings, lists and emphasis are kept, which is what makes a document searchable, editable and readable by an AI tool.

Is there a page or size limit?

No server limit, because there is no server: the work happens on your device. A 300-page document converts in seconds; scanned pages take a few seconds each. Long jobs show progress, an estimated time, and a Cancel button.

Why is the layout of my columns mixed up?

Text is extracted in the order the PDF stores it, which for multi-column layouts is not always the reading order. Academic papers and newspapers are the usual offenders. The text is all there; the sequence may need a pass.

Limitations

Related tools

Guides