PDF → Text (OCR)
Extract text from PDFs with OCR – 26 languages
Why PDF → Text (OCR)?
Make scanned PDFs searchable and editable – OCR recognizes text in 26 languages, even with poor scan quality or multi-page documents. Perfect for invoices, contracts, study materials, and archived documents. Your files are deleted immediately after conversion.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens during PDF to Text OCR?
Your PDF document is analyzed page by page and the recognized text is returned as an editable TXT file. For scanned PDFs (images), OCR is used to read the text. For already searchable PDFs, the embedded text is extracted directly.
What's the difference between scanned and searchable PDFs?
Searchable PDFs already contain embedded text that can be extracted directly. Scanned PDFs consist only of images – here OCR is used to recognize the text in the image. Our converter automatically detects the type and applies OCR when needed.
Which languages are supported?
26 languages are supported, including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, and many more. For multilingual documents, you can specify multiple languages at once.
Are my PDFs stored on the server?
No, your PDFs are deleted immediately and automatically after conversion. We don't store any files and don't keep logs. Your documents stay 100% private.
About TXT
TXT (Plain Text) is the oldest and simplest file format in existence - it contains exclusively characters without formatting, images, or structural markup of any kind. UTF-8 encoding has replaced ASCII as the standard and enables the representation of all Unicode characters, making TXT suitable for multilingual text without any limitations. TXT files are supported by every text editor, programming environment, and operating system without exception. Fault tolerance is maximal: even partially corrupt TXT files remain readable since no header or footer is required. TXT is the format for configuration files, log files, source code, notes, and any content where formatting is irrelevant and pure textual information is paramount. TXT files have no file size limitation beyond the filesystem itself. Converting to PDF is suitable for distribution as a formatted document, while converting from PDF to TXT via OCR makes scanned documents searchable and extracts the raw text content.
About PDF
PDF (Portable Document Format) was developed by Adobe Systems in 1993 and standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008 after Adobe submitted the format for standardization. PDF is the world's leading format for cross-platform document exchange, preserving layout, fonts, images, and interactive elements exactly – regardless of the display device or operating system. The format is based on a mixture of text, vector graphics, and raster images and supports forms, digital signatures, annotation features, and JavaScript actions. PDF/A, a subset for long-term archiving, is the mandatory format for documents subject to retention requirements in government agencies and enterprises. The file structure enables incremental saving, where changes are appended without rewriting the entire file. PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000-2, 2020) brought improvements in accessibility and security. Criticisms include large file sizes when embedding fonts and images, as well as the difficulty of reliably extracting PDF content – which is why OCR-based conversion tools like wandlio are needed to transform scanned PDFs into editable formats.
Why convert PDF → TXT?
PDF (Portable Document Format) is the universal document format for immutable display on any device. However, its contents are hard to extract or edit without specialized tools — text isn't easily copyable, tables aren't directly processable, and embedded images can't be readily exported. Converting to TEXT is needed when you want to extract and edit text, use table data in spreadsheets, export images from the document, or need the entire content in an editable format. TEXT makes PDF contents accessible again.