PDF to Text

A PDF is often a stack of pages you cannot highlight: a scanned contract, a slide deck saved as a file, a homework packet, or a photo-heavy report. PDF to text means turning those pages into a string you can edit and paste. Screenshot2Text does that in this tab. You drop the file, each page is drawn locally, then open-source OCR reads the pixels. We do not upload your PDF for recognition, and we do not store the document or the extracted text on a server.

This page is for people who searched for a free PDF-to-text converter and want the work to stay on their device. The homepage drop zone is the same reader. Images still work here — PNG, JPG, and the other screenshot formats — if you have a picture instead of a PDF. There is no account and no charge. Everything is free forever; the site is ad-supported.

Multi-page files are processed one page at a time so a long document does not freeze the tab. The status line names the current page while recognition runs. When more than one page returns text, the output box prefixes each block with a header so you can see which page produced which paragraph. A page that fails is skipped; the rest continue. Very large PDFs are limited by your computer's memory, not by a site quota.

Scanned PDFs — pages that are really images of paper — are the main job this tool is built for. A digital PDF that already has a text layer is still rendered and read as pixels, so you get OCR rather than a perfect extract of the embedded strings. That is useful when the file is a scan, a flattened export, or a slide with type burned into the artwork. Printed type and high-contrast pages convert most cleanly. Tiny footnotes, heavy compression, and messy handwriting often come back incomplete; we do not claim those will read well. Use the converter on this page, or open the main free tool on the homepage if you would rather start there.