Skip to content
SlimFile

Extract the text from a PDF

Pull every line of text out of a PDF as a plain .txt file. Read entirely in your browser — the file is never uploaded.

Choose your PDFs

up to 10 at a time.

PDFMax 25 MB each

What you get, and what you do not

A PDF has no idea what a line is — it stores glyphs at coordinates. Lines are rebuilt here by grouping characters that share a baseline and reading them left to right, which is what makes the output readable rather than a stream of letters.

Layout does not survive, and cannot: columns, tables and text boxes all become ordinary lines in reading order. If you need the arrangement kept, this is the wrong tool.

A scanned document has no text to find — it is a photograph of a page. This will come back empty and say so; run it through OCR PDF first to give it a text layer.

The whole thing runs in your browser. The PDF is never sent anywhere.

How to use PDF to Text

  1. Add your PDF

    Drop a PDF file onto the page, or click to choose one. Up to 25 MB.

  2. Choose your options

    Adjust any settings the tool offers, or keep the defaults — they are chosen to be right for most files.

  3. Download the result

    Save the result straight to your device.

Why use SlimFile for this

  • Free, no sign-up

    No account, no email address, no trial that runs out.

  • No watermark

    What you download is clean — nothing added to your file.

  • Never leaves your device

    This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.

Questions

Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The text is pulled out in your browser and the .txt file is built there too. The document never leaves your machine, which is the whole reason this one works the way it does.
Why is the layout gone?
A PDF has no concept of a line — it stores glyphs at coordinates. Lines are rebuilt here by grouping characters that share a baseline and reading them left to right, which makes the output readable. Columns, tables and text boxes all flatten into ordinary lines in reading order, and there is no way around that in a plain text file.
I got nothing back. Why?
Almost certainly a scan. A scanned document is a photograph of a page, so there is no text in it to find — only pixels that look like text. Run it through OCR PDF first to add a text layer, then try again.
Does it keep the page breaks?
Pages are separated by a blank line, so the shape of the document survives into a format that has no pages of its own.

Related tools

OCR PDF

Make a scanned PDF's text selectable and searchable.

PDF

Compare PDFs

See exactly what text changed between two versions of a document.

PDF