PDF to Text Converter with Local OCR

What this app does

It opens a PDF in the browser and exports its text as a plain .txt file. The document is not uploaded: it is read with PDF.js and processed on your device.

How to use it

• Open. Tap the file icon and choose a PDF. Pages render as you scroll.
• Move around. Use the arrows for one page at a time, the sidebar for thumbnails, or Go to… with a page number or a percentage.
• Export. Text reads every page and downloads exported_document.txt. Each page starts with a marker such as --- PAGE 1 ---.
• OCR. Choose OCR: ES or OCR: EN before exporting. Only pages with almost no text layer go through OCR.

What it does not do

• It does not let you select or copy text in the viewer; the pages are drawn as images. Copying is done from the exported .txt.
• It does not keep the layout: columns, tables and line breaks come out as plain text.
• It does not OCR a page that already has a few characters of text, even if the rest of the page is an image.
• It does not open password-protected PDFs.
• It does not edit, annotate or sign PDFs.

Privacy

The PDF stays on your device. There is no account and no upload. The first OCR run downloads the language data from a CDN, so it needs a connection.

Frequently asked questions

Can I copy text straight from the page?

No. The viewer draws each page as an image, so the text is not selectable there. To get the text, use Export to text and open the .txt file.

Does it work with scanned PDFs?

Yes, when the page is a flat image. If a page has almost no text layer, the app renders it and runs OCR in English or Spanish on your device. The first OCR run downloads the language data, so it needs a connection.

Is the PDF uploaded anywhere?

No. The file is read in the browser with PDF.js and the OCR runs locally with Tesseract. No copy of the document is sent to a server.

Why does OCR skip some scanned pages?

Because OCR only starts when a page has fewer than about ten characters of real text. A page with a short caption and a large image counts as having text, so only the caption is exported and the image is not read.

What does the .txt file look like?

One block per page, and each block starts with --- PAGE 1 ---. It is plain text, so columns, tables and the original layout are not preserved.

Does it work offline?

The interface is cached, but the PDF engine and the OCR language data are downloaded on first use. After that, the browser cache usually covers them, so a connection is needed at least once.

Can I open a password-protected PDF?

No. The app does not ask for the password, so an encrypted document fails to open.