About the PDF to Text

PDF to Text is a free online tool that extracts all the readable text from a PDF file and returns it as clean, copyable plain text — no sign-up, no file size limit beyond 20 MB.

How It Works

Your PDF is uploaded to our server where pdfminer.six — a pure-Python PDF parser — reads the document structure and extracts all embedded text. Unlike OCR-based tools, pdfminer.six extracts text that is already encoded as text in the PDF's content streams. This means it works instantly on text-based PDFs (created by Word, Google Docs, export-to-PDF, etc.) but cannot extract text from scanned PDFs where content is stored as raster images.

The extractor returns the raw text, total page count, and character count. For scanned PDFs, the tool will tell you that no text was found and suggest using the OCR tool instead.

What Is sortout.app?

sortout.app is a growing collection of focused web tools, each designed to do exactly one thing well. Every tool is free, requires no account, and is built to load fast anywhere.

Privacy

Your files are sent to our server over HTTPS, processed immediately, and deleted — never stored or shared. See our full Privacy Policy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this tool free?

Yes, completely free with no usage limits.

Do I need to create an account?

No. There is no sign-up, no login, and no registration of any kind.

Why does my PDF show "no extractable text"?

Your PDF was likely created by scanning a physical document and saving it as an image. Use our OCR tool instead, which uses Tesseract to read text from images.

Does the extracted text preserve formatting?

The text is returned as plain text with whitespace and line breaks roughly matching the original layout. Tables and multi-column layouts may not preserve their structure.

What is the file size limit?

20 MB. Very large PDFs with many pages may take a few seconds to process.

Contact

Questions or feedback? Open an issue at github.com/sortout-app/feedback or email hello@sortout.app.