◆CleanTextKit

Free PDF Text Extractor & Cleaner

Extract selectable text from PDFs and clean messy formatting for ChatGPT, Claude, Google Docs, Notion, and Markdown.

PDFTEXT CLEANUPBROWSER

Drop your PDF here or click to browse

PDF files only — max 30MB

●Your PDF is processed locally in your browser. Files are not uploaded.

How it works

Drop a text-based PDF or click to upload. PDF.js extracts the selectable text locally in your browser — no server upload. Once extracted, the built-in cleaning engine fixes broken line breaks, rejoins hyphenated words, removes page numbers, and strips repeated headers and footers. Download as clean .txt or .md.

Common use cases

  • Extracting clean text from academic papers and research PDFs for AI analysis
  • Preparing PDF content for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini prompts
  • Converting e-books and digital documents to plain text
  • Recovering editable text from exported PDF reports
  • Cleaning legal documents, contracts, or whitepapers for editing
// FAQ
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. Your PDF is processed entirely in your browser using PDF.js. The file never leaves your device. This is a fundamental design principle of CleanTextKit — all tools run locally.
Why did extraction return no text or very little text?
This usually means your PDF is scanned or image-only (like a photo of a document). PDF.js can only extract selectable text from text-based PDFs. If you see the warning "No selectable text was found," your PDF likely needs OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which is not yet supported.
Does this support scanned PDFs or OCR?
Not yet. This tool extracts selectable text from text-based PDFs only. Scanned/image-only PDFs require OCR technology, which is a more complex feature we may add in the future. For now, if your PDF was created by scanning a physical document, you'll need an OCR tool first.
What's the difference between this and OCR?
This tool extracts existing selectable text from a PDF — text that's already encoded in the file. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) analyzes images of text and converts them to machine-readable text. OCR is needed for scanned documents, photos of text, and image-only PDFs. This extractor handles text-based PDFs created by Word, Google Docs, web browsers, and most digital document tools.
Can I just clean text I copied from a PDF instead?
Yes! If you don't need file upload, try our Clean Copied PDF Text tool. Simply copy text from your PDF (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C) and paste it there. It has the same cleaning engine but skips the extraction step — perfect when you already have the text on your clipboard.
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