Convert a PDF to a plain TXT file
A plain text file is the most portable thing you can make out of a document. It opens in every text editor, it can be searched with simple tools, it fits into scripts and note apps, and it weighs almost nothing. If you have the text of a bank statement, an invoice or a research paper locked in a PDF, PDF to Text can save it as a .txt file for you.
Saving the file
- Open the PDF: drop it on the page or choose Add PDF.
- Let it read through to the last page. The progress line, such as Page 9 / 9, tells you when it has finished.
- Press Download TXT.
The file gets the same name as the PDF, with a new extension: invoice-march.pdf becomes invoice-march.txt, and report.pdf becomes report.txt.
What is inside the TXT file
The file is encoded as UTF-8. That matters more than it sounds: accented letters, Turkish or Polish characters, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and Japanese all survive the trip, and any modern editor will display them correctly without asking you to pick an encoding.
Pages are separated by a page-break character (a form feed), not by printed labels. The Page N headers you see on screen are only there to help you find your way; they are not written into the file. Many editors show the page break as a small symbol or simply as a line break, and tools that split text by page can use it directly.
Inside each page, every line of the PDF becomes one line of text. Headers and footers that sit on the page, such as a document title or a page number, are part of the page’s text and stay in the file. Tables are flattened: each row turns into a single line, with the cells separated by spaces.
On iPhone and iPad
On iPhone and iPad the button is called Save or share. Tap it and choose Files, or another app or destination from the share sheet. If sharing is not available in your browser, the TXT file opens in a new tab, and you can save it from there.
When the button stays grey
Download TXT only works when there is text to save. If none of the pages has selectable text, you will see No selectable text found in this PDF and both the download and the copy button stay off. This usually means the PDF is a scan made of page images. If only some pages are images, the others are still saved, and a note at the top names the pages that had nothing to read.
The PDF never leaves your browser while this happens; it is not uploaded to app.zone’s servers.
Extract the text in your browser → PDF to Text