How PDF to text works
PDF to text extracts the text content embedded in a PDF and delivers it as a plain .txt file. It reads the character streams stored in the document, no OCR is involved, so the output is fast and exact for digitally-created PDFs where the text is already machine-readable.
If your PDF is a scanned image with no embedded text layer, use the OCR tool instead. For everything else, contracts, reports, ebooks, this tool pulls out the text instantly with pdf.js. Plain text has no layout model, so columns, tables and font sizes are not preserved; you get the reading order of the characters as stored in the PDF.