What you should know
PDF to TXT extracts the raw text of a document. It is useful to reuse a paragraph, feed a tool, index a corpus or check a file's content without opening it.
The result depends entirely on the nature of the PDF: a software-generated document contains real text, a scan contains only an image.
Strengths
- Fast, lightweight extraction
- Text immediately reusable in another application
- No parasitic formatting
- Works on native PDFs with no extra tool
Limitations to know
- A scanned PDF yields no text without OCR
- Layout, tables and columns are flattened
- Ligatures and accents may come out wrong depending on encoding
- Images and annotations are ignored
When to use it
Extract to TXT to reuse the text, not to preserve the document. If layout matters, keep the PDF; if the document is a scan, plan for character recognition and proofreading.
Quality, size and compatibility
On a native PDF, extraction is faithful to the character. FileXvert does not perform optical character recognition: a scan will give an empty or nearly empty file. Run it through OCR software first, then proofread, especially figures and proper nouns.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does my scanned PDF yield nothing?
- Because it contains no text, only an image of the page. Optical character recognition is essential before any extraction.
- Are tables preserved?
- No: columns become spaces or separate lines. For tabular data, use a format such as CSV and check the result.