PDF to text

How to convert a PDF to text

Choose or drop a PDF. Each page is handled in the best way for that page: if the page already contains real text (a PDF made by Word, a website or an accounting program), that exact text is taken directly; if the page is only a picture (a scan or a phone photo saved as PDF), it is read by OCR. The result appears in an editable box that you can copy or download as a .txt file.

• Step 1 — choose the PDF (up to 20 MB; the first 20 pages are read).
• Step 2 — wait while each page is read; the progress line shows the page.
• Step 3 — check the text, then copy it or download the .txt file.

Digital and scanned pages

Above the text you will see how many pages came from the PDF’s own text and how many were read by OCR. Text taken from a digital page is exact. Text read from a scanned page depends on the scan quality, so check it before you use it. Tables are returned as lines of text, not cells; for a table, the free PDF to Excel tool is a better fit.

Private by design

The file never leaves your device. The reading runs inside your browser with an open-source OCR engine (Tesseract), so nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored and no AI service sees it. You can even disconnect from the internet once the page and the reader have loaded.

The first run

The first time you use a browser tool, your browser downloads the reader — a few megabytes — from mahadocr.com and keeps it. Later runs start much faster. On an older phone a full page can take a little while; keep the page open until the result appears.

When you need more than text

These free tools give you plain text or a simple table. If you need named fields — an invoice number, a passport’s date of birth, a CV’s work history — checked and marked ✓ confirmed or ⚠ check it, use the Mahad OCR API. It reads documents on our servers, returns JSON, and has a free Sandbox plan to try it.

Frequently asked questions