PDF to Text Converter
Drag & Drop PDF here
or click to browse local files
About PDF to Text Converter
In today's digital landscape, accessibility and data extraction are paramount. The **PDF to Text Converter** by Randomly.online is a sophisticated, browser-based utility designed to bridge the gap between static documents and editable data. Unlike traditional desktop software that requires heavy installation or cloud-based services that compromise privacy by uploading your sensitive contracts or financial statements to remote servers, our tool operates entirely within your web browser (Client-Side). This ensures that your files never leave your device, guaranteeing 100% privacy and security. For advanced users who need to preserve layout fidelity, we also recommend checking our HTML to PDF Converter for structured document creation.
Whether you are a student researching historical archives, a developer scraping data for analysis, or a legal professional needing to extract clauses from a scanned contract, this tool adapts to your needs. We utilize advanced technologies like PDF.js for rendering and Tesseract.js for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), allowing the system to read text even from flattened images or scanned pages. If you simply need to read or present a document without extraction, our Advanced PDF Viewer provides a distraction-free environment.
Furthermore, we understand the need for versatile output formats. While plain text is universal, our tool allows you to export structured data in JSON format for programming needs, DOCX for word processing, or a ZIP archive containing individual text files for every page processed. This flexibility makes it an indispensable tool for workflow automation and document management.
How to Use This Tool
Using the PDF to Text Converter is intuitive and designed to minimize friction. Follow this simple step-by-step guide to get the most out of the application:
1. Upload Your Document: Begin by dragging and dropping your PDF file into the designated upload zone. Alternatively, click the "Select PDF" button to browse your device's file manager. The tool supports large files and multi-page documents seamlessly. If your document is a scan and quality is low, try converting it using our PDF to Grayscale tool first to improve OCR accuracy.
2. Select Pages: Once uploaded, the tool generates visual thumbnails of every page. You can click on individual thumbnails to select or deselect them. For large documents, use the "Page Range" input bar at the top (e.g., type "1-5, 10" to select the first five pages and page ten).
3. Choose Extraction Mode: If your PDF is a standard digital file, simply click "Extract Text". If your file is a scan (an image inside a PDF), check the "Enable OCR" box. This triggers the optical recognition engine to identify letters and words within the image.
4. Review and Export: The extracted text will appear in the large editor window below. You can use the built-in search bar to locate specific terms within the results. Finally, use the "Download As" dropdown to save your text in your preferred format (.txt, .docx, .json, or .zip).
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, your data is completely safe. Privacy is the core philosophy of Randomly.online. When you use this PDF to Text Converter, the processing happens locally on your device using JavaScript. Your PDF file is never uploaded to any external server or cloud storage. This means strictly confidential documents, such as bank statements, legal contracts, or personal IDs, remain on your computer or phone throughout the entire process. You can even use this tool while offline once the page has loaded.
Absolutely. We have integrated powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology directly into the browser. Standard PDF converters often fail with scanned documents because they only look for digital text layers. Our "Enable OCR" feature scans the visual pixel data of the page to recognize characters, numbers, and symbols. If your PDF contains many high-resolution photos making it slow, consider using Compress Images inside PDF before processing.
We do not enforce hard limits on file size or page counts because the processing is done by your own device's hardware (CPU and RAM). However, extremely large files (e.g., 500+ pages or 100MB+) might run slower on older mobile devices or computers with limited memory. For the best experience with massive documents, we recommend extracting text in batches. If you are dealing with scanned images specifically, you might also find our Photo Enhancer useful for pre-processing source images before converting them to PDF.