Extract the text from a PDF. It is converted in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.
Drop PDF files here
or choose from your computer paste with Ctrl V
from Photos or Files
Ready · other file types work too0 bytes uploaded, ever
Drop PDF files onto the box above, or click it to choose them. ToAny reads the file's contents to detect the type, so a wrong extension does not matter.
Press Convert. Open Options first if you want to change the defaults. The work happens in this tab.
Save the TXT, or download everything as one ZIP if you converted several files.
The PDF to TXT converter is part of this page and runs inside your browser. Your documents are never sent to ToAny or to anyone else.
Nothing has to travel to a server and back, so the conversion starts the moment you press Convert, even on a slow connection.
No sign-up, no email address and no watermark. Add several files and download them together as a ZIP.
Plain text is what you need to quote, search, translate or feed a document into another tool. Only text that actually exists in the PDF can be extracted: a scanned document is a set of page images and contains no text until it has been through OCR. Columns, tables and footnotes come out in reading order as best the PDF allows, without their layout.
The defaults suit most files. Under Options you can choose which pages to convert and set or supply a password.
Only the text and its outline (headings, paragraphs, lists) are rebuilt. Tables, columns set side by side and images do not survive, and a scanned PDF, which holds pictures of pages rather than text, yields little or nothing because ToAny does not do OCR. A password-protected PDF needs its password, entered under Options; without it the file is refused.
PDF fixes a document's layout so it looks identical on every screen and printer. That makes it the default for forms, invoices and anything sent to print, and also what makes it awkward to edit.
Opens in Every browser, phone and computer
PDF converterA TXT file is characters and nothing else: no fonts, no images, no layout. That makes it the most portable document there is, and the easiest to search, diff or feed into another program.
Opens in Every device and every text editor
TXT converter| PDFPDF document | TXTPlain text | |
|---|---|---|
| Stands for | Portable Document Format | Plain text |
| Type | Fixed-layout document | Unformatted text |
| Compression | Mixed: text is stored as text, images keep their own compression | None |
| Introduced | 1993, by Adobe (an ISO standard since 2008) | The 1960s, by no single author |
| Opens in | Every browser, phone and computer | Every device and every text editor |
| Best for | Documents that must look the same everywhere, and printing | Notes, logs and text that must be read by anything |
| File extension | .pdf, .ai | .txt, .text, .log |
A scan is a picture of each page. There is no text in the file to extract; that requires optical character recognition (OCR).
No. The PDF to TXT conversion runs inside your browser, on your own phone or computer. The file is not sent to ToAny or to anyone else.
Text is kept. Formatting carries over only as far as TXT supports it.
Yes. Add as many as you like, convert them together and download each result or all of them as one ZIP.
The steps are the same everywhere because ToAny runs in the web browser: open this page in a current version of Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox, add the PDF file, press Convert and save the TXT. There is nothing to install.
Because nothing is uploaded, the practical limit is your device's memory. Very large files can fail on phones with little free memory; a computer copes better.