Best PDF to Text Tools in 2026

First check: is the PDF digital or scanned?

This is the most important distinction. A digitally created PDF usually contains an actual text layer. A scanned PDF may contain only page images, even though you can clearly see words on the screen.

Try dragging your cursor across a sentence. If individual words can be selected, direct text extraction will usually be faster and more accurate than OCR. If nothing can be selected, or the whole page selects as one image, OCR is normally required.

Best option for a quick browser workflow: EveryPDFTool

EveryPDFTool PDF to Text extracts text that already exists inside a PDF and downloads it as a UTF-8 TXT file. It is designed for digital PDFs where preserving the original visual layout is not important.

For image-only documents, use OCR PDF to Text instead. Keeping these two jobs separate makes it clearer whether the document needs text extraction or actual character recognition.

PDF24: online PDF-to-text with a separate OCR route

PDF24 provides a dedicated browser-based PDF-to-Text converter. Its current service states that the tool is free, does not require registration and performs conversion on PDF24's servers. PDF24 also provides a separate OCR tool for scanned documents.

This makes PDF24 useful when you want an established online alternative with both direct conversion and OCR available as separate workflows.

Adobe Acrobat: PDF export plus OCR tools

Adobe Acrobat can export PDFs to TXT and offers encoding settings for the text output. Acrobat also includes Scan & OCR features for scanned PDFs, allowing image-based text to be recognized before it is reused or exported.

This is a broader document workflow than a simple PDF-to-TXT utility and may suit users who already work inside the Acrobat ecosystem.

pdftotext: local command-line extraction

pdftotext, part of the Poppler utilities, converts PDF files to plain text from the command line. It is particularly useful for developers, scripts, servers and repeated local extraction jobs.

It is a direct text extractor rather than an OCR engine, so image-only scanned documents need a separate OCR step.

ABBYY FineReader: advanced OCR workflow

ABBYY FineReader is focused heavily on OCR and document recognition. Its OCR Editor can recognize PDF pages and document images, review recognized text, work with recognition areas and export results to formats including TXT.

It is more suitable for demanding OCR work than someone who only needs occasional plain-text extraction from a normal digital PDF.

Why does PDF-to-text sometimes return nothing?

A blank or nearly blank TXT file often means the PDF does not contain a usable text layer. This is common with scanned documents, photographed paperwork and some exported image-based PDFs. In that case, use OCR PDF to Text rather than repeatedly trying normal extraction.

Why can extracted text appear in the wrong order?

A PDF is primarily a page-description format, not a normal flowing-text document. Words may be stored according to coordinates on the page rather than paragraph order. Multi-column documents, sidebars, headers, footers and positioned text boxes can therefore produce unexpected reading order when converted to plain text. Researchers extracting papers and source material can also see our PDF tools for researchers guide.

What happens to tables?

Plain TXT cannot preserve spreadsheet-style cells, borders or visual columns reliably. If the information you need is mainly tabular, PDF to Excel is usually a better starting point. If you need editable paragraphs and more of the document structure, consider PDF to Word.

PDF to Text vs OCR PDF to Text vs PDF to Word

A practical extraction workflow

Start by testing whether the PDF contains selectable text. Use direct extraction when it does. If the result is blank because the pages are images, switch to OCR. For important names, numbers, dates and references, compare the extracted result with the original document because OCR and complex PDF reading order can introduce errors.

What to check after extraction

Pay particular attention to multi-column pages, tables, hyphenated words, headers and footers. OCR output also deserves extra checking when the scan is blurry, skewed, low contrast or contains unusual fonts.

Official sources checked

This comparison was reviewed against current official documentation for the external tools mentioned above.

PDF24 PDF to Text · PDF24 OCR · Adobe PDF to Text · pdftotext documentation · ABBYY supported formats