Free tool

PDF to text the words, nothing else.

Every word in the PDF as a plain text file, page by page, ready to paste anywhere.

PDF to text at a glance

content.win extracts the text a PDF already carries,, with line breaks kept. It tells you plainly when a page is a scan with no text in it, instead of returning an empty file.

Works with
PDF, one or several at once.
Comes back as
A .txt file with the text of every page, pages separated by a blank line. Or a Word file, one click away.
Runs
In your browser.
Limits
No daily limit and no cap on files. Scanned pages have no text layer and come back empty.
Price
Free. No account, no watermark.

How to extract text from a PDF

  1. Drop the PDF in. Every page appears as a thumbnail; remove any you don't need.
  2. Download TXT. The words of every page, in order.
  3. Or Download Word. The same text as a .docx, for editing.

What comes out

Text and line breaks
Words in reading order, lines as they were. Columns come out one after the other.
Not the layout
Fonts, tables, images and positions are not part of a text file. For those, keep the PDF.
Scans
A scanned page is a picture; there are no words to extract. The result says so.

Questions people ask

How do I get the text out of a PDF?

Drop it in and click Download TXT. You get one text file with every page.

Why is my file empty?

The PDF is a scan: the words are pixels, not text. It needs OCR, which this tool does not do yet.

Does it keep paragraphs?

Line breaks are kept as they were in the PDF. Paragraphs usually come through; hyphenated line ends do not get rejoined.

Can I get Word instead?

Yes, Download Word gives a .docx with the same text, or use the PDF to Word page.

Several PDFs?

Drop them all; the text comes out in the order of the pages in the grid.