How to Convert a PDF to Text on Windows — Extract All Text
Extract text from PDFs on Windows using a free browser tool or command-line method. Copy text from any PDF without Adobe Acrobat.
Extract all text from a PDF on Windows without Adobe Acrobat. FixMyPDF's PDF to Text tool in Chrome or Edge extracts text from any searchable PDF in seconds.
Windows PDF to Text Options
Adobe Acrobat Pro: File > Export To > Text (paid). Microsoft Edge: open PDF, Ctrl+A to select, Ctrl+C to copy — page by page only. pdftotext CLI (Xpdf/Poppler for Windows, free). FixMyPDF: free, browser-based, all pages extracted at once.
How to Extract Text on Windows
Open Chrome or Edge. Navigate to fixmypdf.in/tools/pdf-text. Upload your PDF. Click "Extract Text". Download the .txt file. Open in Notepad, Word, or any text editor. All text from all pages is in the file.
Using Microsoft Edge to Copy PDF Text
Open the PDF in Microsoft Edge. Press Ctrl+A to select all (this selects the full page view). Press Ctrl+C. Paste into Word or Notepad with Ctrl+V. Limitation: works one page at a time for multi-page PDFs. FixMyPDF extracts all pages at once.
pdftotext CLI for Windows
Download Xpdf tools for Windows from the project website. Open Command Prompt and run: pdftotext.exe input.pdf output.txt. Extracts all text from all pages. Best for batch processing or integration into Windows scripts.
What About Scanned PDFs on Windows?
Scanned PDFs contain images with no embedded text. To extract text, OCR is required. Windows 11 has built-in OCR in Snipping Tool for screen captures. For full PDF OCR, Adobe Acrobat Pro or ABBYY FineReader are the standard Windows tools. Alternatively, use Google Drive: upload the scanned PDF, open as Google Doc — Drive performs OCR automatically.
Using Extracted Text in Office Applications
The extracted .txt file opens in Notepad or Word. In Word, use Find & Replace to clean up any extraction artefacts (extra line breaks, hyphenated words split across lines). The clean text is then ready for editing, analysis, or reformatting.
Privacy
FixMyPDF extracts text locally in your browser. No PDF content is transmitted to any server. Works offline after initial page load.
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