Question 1

What does this tool do?

Accepted Answer

It extracts plain text from PDF files entirely in your browser. We load the PDF using pdf-lib, walk each page's content stream looking for text-showing operators (Tj, TJ, ', "), decode the string operands (literal and hex strings), and join them into a .txt file. No external API, no upload — everything runs in JavaScript.

Question 2

What PDF features are supported?

Accepted Answer

We support: text in standard content streams (Tj/TJ/'/" operators), text in compressed streams (FlateDecode is decompressed via DecompressionStream), multiple pages, page ranges, custom line separators, whitespace trimming, empty-line removal, line numbering, and basic font-based character decoding. We do NOT support: scanned PDFs (images of text — needs OCR which requires a 5MB+ WASM blob), encrypted/password-protected PDFs (pdf-lib throws — we surface a clear error), embedded fonts with custom encodings (we treat strings as UTF-16BE or PDFDocEncoding heuristically), right-to-left scripts, and form fields with appearances.

Question 3

Why is the extracted text sometimes garbled?

Accepted Answer

PDF text strings can use one of several encodings: PDFDocEncoding (Latin-1-like), UTF-16BE (with BOM), or custom font-specific encodings (Type1/CIDFont with custom CMaps). We heuristically detect UTF-16BE (strings starting with 0xFE 0xFF) and decode the rest as PDFDocEncoding (treated as Latin-1). For fonts with custom CMaps (common in CJK PDFs), the extracted bytes will not map to readable characters without the CMap data. Use pdftotext (poppler-utils) on desktop for those cases.

Question 4

What extra features does this tool have compared to others?

Accepted Answer

10 extras: (1) Drag-drop input. (2) Page range selector (e.g. '1-3,5,7-9'). (3) Custom line separator (
, 
, or custom). (4) Trim whitespace per line. (5) Remove empty lines. (6) Stats — page count, word count, character count, line count. (7) Output encoding (UTF-8 with/without BOM). (8) Line numbers prepended. (9) History of recently converted PDFs (localStorage — last 10). (10) Shareable URL with conversion options.

Question 5

Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?

Accepted Answer

No. All PDF parsing and text extraction runs in your browser using pure JavaScript and pdf-lib. File contents never leave your device. Only conversion summaries (filename + page count) are saved to local history.

Question 6

Why does my PDF say 'encrypted' or 'password-protected'?

Accepted Answer

PDFs can be encrypted with a user password (required to open) or an owner password (required to remove restrictions like copy/print). pdf-lib cannot decrypt password-protected PDFs in pure JavaScript — that requires a native crypto library. Use qpdf --decrypt (command-line) or Adobe Acrobat to remove the encryption first, then upload the decrypted PDF here.

PDF to Text Converter

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