PDF to Text

Find this application for Linux (.deb) at 👉 Linux Downloads

PDF to Text opens a PDF in your browser, lets you read it page by page and exports its content as a plain text file. The document is never uploaded: it is read with PDF.js and processed on your device.

What you can do with it

• Read the document. Pages render as you scroll, with a thumbnail strip on the side to jump to any of them.
• Jump to a page. The arrows move one page at a time, and the Go to... box accepts a page number or a percentage, which is handy when you only remember that a chapter was halfway through.
• Export the text. Text reads every page and downloads exported_document.txt, with a marker such as --- PAGE 1 --- before each page.
• Read scans with OCR. If a page has almost no text layer, the app renders it and recognises the characters with Tesseract, in English or Spanish, on the device.

Where the OCR helps, and where it does not

A PDF that comes out of a scanner is usually an image inside a PDF container, with no text to copy. The OCR fallback exists for exactly that case. Two limits are worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It only runs on a page with fewer than about ten characters of real text. A page with a small caption printed over a scanned image counts as text, so the caption is exported and the rest is not read.
• The first OCR run downloads the language data. After that the browser keeps it, but a connection is needed at least once.

What it does not do

• It does not let you select or copy text in the viewer: pages are drawn as images. You copy from the exported .txt.
• It does not preserve the layout. Columns, tables and paragraphs come out as a single stream per page.
• It does not open password-protected documents. There is no password prompt.
• It does not edit, annotate or sign PDFs, and it does not compress them.
• Large documents take time: the export walks every page, and OCR is slow by nature.

Privacy

The document stays on your device from start to finish. There is no account, no upload and no copy on a server. The app is a progressive web app, so it can be installed with its own icon.

If what you have is an image rather than a PDF, the image to text tool does the same job with photos and screenshots. For books, the EPUB reader reflows the text and remembers your place, which a PDF never does.