PDF to text

Read any PDF into clean text.

Drop a PDF — printed, scanned or handwritten — and read it back as clean, editable text in moments. No upload limits, no watermark, no nonsense.

Input · scanned.pdf

Invoice 0142
Design work …… 480.00
Print & bind …… 95.00
VAT (20%) ……… 115.00
Total ……… 690.00

Read · editable text

Invoice 0142
Design work — £480.00
Print & bind — £95.00
VAT (20%) — £115.00
Total — £690.00

Why it's different

The reader for the pages other PDF tools fumble.

Handwriting

Read far more reliably than the legacy, print-only converters that struggle the moment a page is handwritten.

Tables preserved

Come back as a markdown grid or CSV — not a loose pile of mis-positioned numbers.

Scanned PDFs

Where many converters stall on a scan, the same workflow reads it just like any other page.

No ads on free

The free tier stays clean and ad-free — no banner walls between you and your text.

Side-by-side review

See the original page, edit the read text beside it, then export with confidence.

No limits, no watermark

No upload caps and nothing stamped on your output. Read it and use it.

How it works

From PDF to text in four steps.

1

Drop your PDF

Drop the file on the reader — printed, scanned or handwritten.

2

It reads each page

Wait a moment while every page is read into text.

3

Review

Check and edit the text beside the original page.

4

Export

Download as .txt, .md or .docx, or copy to clipboard.

Honest about accuracy

Printed PDFs read near-perfectly; messy handwriting is harder. The read text always sits beside your original, so you can fix anything before you use it.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?

Yes — that's the whole point. It reads scanned pages where older OCR gives up. Handwriting, table layouts and faded text all read well.

Is it really free?

5 PDFs a day anonymously, 20 a day signed in. Pro at £9.99 a month removes the cap and unlocks tables to CSV.

How does it compare to Adobe Acrobat?

Older OCR engines often mangle scans. Our reader is far more reliable on handwriting and keeps table structure intact.

Does my PDF leave my computer?

For reading scanned pages, each page is sent to a third-party reading service for transcription and is not stored. For pure-text PDFs, the in-browser pdf-to-word converter does the conversion without any upload step.