Free PDF to Text Converter, No Sign-Up
Choose a PDF, image, DOCX, or TXT file to extract its text. PDFs with selectable text are read right in your browser; flip on AI vision OCR for scanned PDFs, and images always use it. Uploads are limited to 15 files per hour.
How to use this tool
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Choose a file. PDFs up to 30 MB are read right in your browser; Word files, text files and images can be up to 4 MB.
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For PDFs: leave OCR off to extract the existing text layer, or flip it on for scanned documents.
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For images: vision OCR runs automatically — no toggle needed.
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Copy the result or download it as a .txt file.
Why this tool exists
Most PDFs already have a text layer that's easy to extract: every word is stored as actual text behind the rendered page. But many PDFs in the wild don't: scanned textbooks, handouts photographed on a phone, printed assignments scanned back in, old forms. For those, the only way to get usable text is OCR, running an algorithm or AI model that reads the image of each page and types out what it sees.
This tool handles the easy and the hard cases. Native PDFs and DOCX files extract instantly. For scanned PDFs, flip on the OCR toggle — the same AI vision model Cereby uses internally reads each page image and returns the text. Image uploads (PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP) always go through vision OCR since there's no text layer to read.
Limits exist because OCR is genuinely expensive on a per-page basis and the tool would not survive scripted abuse without them. For larger documents, batch processing, and the full file-parsing pipeline (PPTX, XLSX, audio, video transcription), Cereby's main app removes the caps.
When you'd use this
- Pulling notes out of a scanned textbook, handout, or photo of the board
- Converting a printed assignment or DOCX back into editable text
- Extracting quotes from a research paper PDF
- Reading text out of a screenshot or whiteboard photo
Turn the extracted text into flashcards or a quiz
Getting the text out is the first step. The studying happens when you do something with it. Upload the same PDF or slides to Cereby and it builds a flashcard deck from the key terms, or a practice quiz that explains every answer.
That works for a scanned handout too: Cereby reads scanned pages with the same kind of OCR this tool uses, so a photo of the board can become a set of cards the night before the exam.