4 Free Online PDF Tools
These 4 PDF tools do one thing the usual online PDF sites cannot: they read your file without ever receiving it. PDF Text Extractor pulls the plain text out of a document — the whole file or just the pages you name — and gives you back paragraphs rebuilt from wrapped lines, a strict line-by-line dump, or a spacing-preserved layout view, ready to copy or download as a .txt. PDF to Markdown Converter goes further and rebuilds structure: headings recovered from relative font size, bulleted and numbered lists, bold and italic runs, and hyperlinks kept as Markdown links, with a live preview beside the source. Both read the PDF’s own text layer through a local copy of Mozilla’s pdf.js, running entirely in your browser. That matters more for PDFs than for almost any other format, because the PDFs people need to process are so often contracts, invoices, statements, and unpublished drafts.
All 4 PDF tools
What you can do with these PDF tools
Both tools start from the same text layer and differ in how much structure they try to rebuild.
- Extract plain text — every word from the document, as paragraphs, as one line per line of the PDF, or with the original column spacing preserved.
- Pick pages — pull just pages 1-3, page 7, and everything from page 10 on, without splitting the file first.
- Clean as you go — join words hyphenated across a line break, drop repeated running headers, footers, and page numbers, and collapse runs of blank lines.
- Convert to Markdown — headings, lists, emphasis, and links rebuilt into a .md file you can commit to a repository or paste into a wiki.
- Open password-protected files — enter the password once and it is used locally to unlock the document for reading.
- Copy or download — plain .txt from the extractor, .md from the converter, plus word, character, page, and line counts for both.
Which one do you want?
Reach for PDF Text Extractor when the text itself is the point: feeding a document to an LLM, grepping a spec, quoting a clause, or counting words. It is also the one to use when the PDF’s formatting is doing you no favours — a slide deck, a form, a table-heavy report — because a plain-text dump is honest about what is actually on the page. Reach for PDF to Markdown Converter when the document has real structure you want to keep: a whitepaper, a manual, an article that is going to become a page on a site. Both tools share the same hard limit. They read the text layer a PDF carries, so a scan or a photograph — pages that are images of text — has nothing to read; both detect that and say so rather than handing back an empty file. Getting text out of those needs optical character recognition, which neither tool includes.