PDF to Text (OCR)

This free PDF to text tool extracts written text from one or many PDFs at once. For digital PDFs it reads the embedded text layer instantly; for scanned documents or images, tick “Force OCR” to recognise the text with optical character recognition. Choose how the text is laid out, limit the extraction to specific pages, and copy or download the result as a .txt file.

Three extraction modes give you control over the output. Reading order reflows the text into natural paragraphs, joining lines that were only broken to fit the page and (optionally) repairing words split by a hyphen at a line end. Preserve layout keeps the original column and spacing arrangement — useful for tables, forms and multi-column pages. Raw returns the text exactly in the order it is stored. Use the Pages box to extract a subset such as1-3, 5, 8-, drop in several PDFs to batch-extract them into a single document with per-file and per-page separators, and watch the live word, character and page counts update as you go.