Convert PDF to text
Extract plain text from any PDF, including scanned and image-only files.
Result
Your Markdown or JSON shows up here.
3 free pages a day, no sign-up.
How it works
- Step 1Upload your PDF
- Step 2We extract the text in reading order
- Step 3Copy the text or download it
Why use this PDF to text converter
Works on scanned PDFs
If you cannot select the text in your PDF, it is a picture of text. OCR reads it and gives you real characters.
Reading order kept
Two-column layouts, headers and footers are detected, so sentences are not cut in half across columns.
No watermark or sign-up
Read a few pages a day for free without creating an account.
What people use it for
- Copying a quote out of a scanned book or article
- Getting text out of a PDF that blocks copy and paste because it is an image
- Preparing documents for search, translation or a word count
- Bulk text extraction through the API for archives
Models that do this well
The free tool picks one for you. With the API you choose, and can set fallbacks so a failed page is retried on the next model.
1Mistral OCRFast document OCR that returns clean Markdown with tables and embedded images.
mistral/mistral-ocr6 credits / page2Gemini FlashGeneral vision model with strong handwriting and layout understanding at a low price.google/gemini-flash3 credits / page3Amazon TextractAWS OCR with form key-value pairs, tables and per-word confidence scores.aws/textract6 credits / page4TesseractThe classic open-source OCR engine. Plain text from clean printed scans.tesseract/tesseractFreeDo it with the API
Converting more than a few files? The same conversion is one request. Pick any model, or let auto choose.
curl https://api.ocrrouter.ai/v1/ocr \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OCRROUTER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "auto",
"file_url": "https://example.com/invoice.pdf",
"format": "markdown"
}'