Ways to use PDF to text
- Quoting and research: take passages from papers, reports or ebooks without retyping them.
- Translation: paste a foreign language letter or manual into a translation tool.
- Summaries: give the text of a 60 page report to an AI assistant and ask for the key points.
- Search and archive: keep a small .txt copy of statements, terms or manuals that is quick to search.
- Data cleanup: move numbers or lists from a PDF into a spreadsheet, then tidy them.
The output is plain text, so fonts, colors, images and table borders are dropped. Only the characters remain, which is often exactly the point.
Text vs Word: which tool do you need?
| PDF to Text | PDF to Word | |
|---|---|---|
| Output | .txt file or clipboard | .docx file |
| Formatting | None, plain characters | Paragraphs and page breaks |
| Best for | Pasting, searching, translating | Editing and reworking a document |
If you plan to rewrite the document and send it back, choose PDF to Word. If the words only need to go somewhere else, plain text is quicker.
Why some PDFs give no text
A scanned PDF is a set of photos of paper pages. There are no letters inside for a computer to read, only pixels. Those files need OCR, which FileKiwi does not offer yet, so a fully scanned PDF shows a message that no text was found.
To check before you start, try to highlight a word in your PDF reader. If you can, the text will extract. In a mixed PDF where only some pages are scanned, you get the text of the other pages.
To read scanned pages on screen instead, save them as images with PDF to PNG.