Extract text from a PDF
Save the document text as a .txt file, or as Markdown with headings and lists inferred from type size and spacing. A PDF stores glyphs at coordinates rather than structure, so the Markdown conversion is a well-behaved guess rather than a faithful translation.
How to do it
- Open the PDF.
- Open the compress and convert panel, then the Text tab.
- Choose plain text or Markdown.
Why nothing is uploaded
Most online PDF tools work by sending your file to a server, editing it there, and sending it back. That means contracts, medical records, bank statements and passports all end up on someone else's machine, and you are trusting a privacy policy about what happens next.
This editor does the work in your browser instead. The PDF is read by this tab, rendered with pdf.js and written back out with pdf-lib, both running as ordinary JavaScript on your own device. There is no upload endpoint, because there is no server doing any of this. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network entirely and everything still works.
Questions
- Is my file uploaded?
- No. Everything happens in this browser tab, on your own device. There is no upload endpoint and no server-side processing, so the file never leaves your machine — you can disconnect from the network after the page loads and it still works.
- Nothing came out — why?
- The document is almost certainly a scan: a picture of a page, with no text objects in it at all. Extraction can only return text that is actually there; reading a scan needs OCR.
- How good is the Markdown?
- Good on conventionally laid-out documents, weaker on anything unusual. Headings come from lines noticeably larger than the body text, lists from bullet glyphs, and code from monospaced fonts. A PDF records none of that explicitly, so it is inference.
Related tools
- Convert a PDF to images — Save each page of a PDF as a PNG or JPEG at a resolution you choose. Runs entirely in your browser.
- Compress a PDF — Make a PDF smaller in your browser, with an honest account of what each option costs. Nothing is uploaded.
- Fill in a PDF form — Fill in an interactive PDF form and optionally flatten it, entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
- The full editor — annotate, sign, fill forms, redact, OCR and more.
Part of messy-ui. Free, open source and account-free — see also the countdown timer.