How it works

The short version: your browser does all the work, and your file never touches a server.

What happens when you drop a PDF

A PDF is not a picture of a page — inside most PDFs, every run of text is stored as characters with coordinates that say where on the page it should be drawn. When you drop a file here, the page reads it with your browser's own file API and hands it to PDF.js, the open-source PDF engine developed by Mozilla and used by Firefox to display PDFs. PDF.js decodes each page and returns those text runs with their positions.

The converter then reassembles reading order from the geometry: runs that share a vertical position are joined into lines, lines are sorted from top to bottom, and larger vertical gaps become paragraph breaks. The result is the plain text you see in the output panel.

Why "no upload" matters

Most free PDF converters work by uploading your document to their servers, converting it there, and sending the result back. That model means your file — often a contract, a bank statement, a medical record — sits on someone else's computer, subject to their retention policy and their security. This tool removes that step entirely. The conversion happens in a sandboxed worker inside your browser, and you can verify it: open your browser's developer tools, watch the network tab, and convert a file. No request carries your document.

What it can and cannot read

Digitally-created PDFs — exported from Word, LaTeX, a browser, an invoice system — carry real text and convert cleanly. Scanned PDFs are photographs of paper: there are no characters inside, only pixels, so plain extraction finds nothing. For those, the tool offers OCR (optical character recognition) powered by the open-source Tesseract engine compiled to WebAssembly: each page is rendered to an image and read on your device. The OCR engine itself is served from this website, not from a CDN, so even that step involves no third party. Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked before conversion.

The technology, briefly

The site is a static page — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with no backend at all. PDF parsing runs in a Web Worker so the page stays responsive on large documents. Because there is no server component, there is nothing to log your files, nothing to breach, and nothing to slow down under load.