2022-09-08 17:15:25 • Filed to: Knowledge of PDF Files • Proven solutions
Converting PDF to plain text is usually done when you want to edit the content in a text editor like Notepad or Apple Notes. You do it so the formatting is removed and the content is just simple text. This simple text, which is also known as plain text, is a type of lightweight file format that doesn't allow for style elements like font types, colors, etc. This article will show three methods on how to convert PDF into plain text documents.
Wondershare PDFelement - PDF Editor is an all-around PDF management tool with powerful, fast, and accurate conversion features. You can choose HTML as your output file, as well as Office files, and several other formats. The "To Text" option can also extract all text data from the PDF or perform OCR if the documents were scanned or photographed. The Pro version offers an OCR plugin that you can quickly activate to convert scanned PDFs into searchable, readable, and editable text.
In addition, you can use PDFelement to edit PDFs, annotate them, secure them with password encryption, e-sign them, create PDF forms, edit and fill forms, and even convert non-interactive forms to fully fillable and interactive ones.
Here's how to convert PDF to HTML:
PDFelement is known to be faster and more reliable at converting disparate file types from PDF into their original formats. There are also several specific rules you can apply before converting, and it gives you more freedom than most other PDF editors.
One free option to convert your PDFs to plain text files is to use an online PDF editor like hipdf. The service is free, and if you have a strong connection providing you high-speed Internet access, this might be a better option than downloading an application for PDF conversions. That's especially true if you don't do such tasks very often. Here are the steps:
With hipdf, the conversion is clean and all the text elements are extracted neatly into the .txt file. If you're concerned about online data theft, you're better off using a downloadable application like PDFelement. It is available for download not only on Windows and Mac, but also on iOS and Android. Based on your subscription, you can have access to Standard and Professional features across all your devices.
The simplest definition of plain text is actually the name itself. Think of a program devoid of any graphical elements or any other objects other than letters, numbers, spaces, line breaks, punctuation marks, and other basic, human-readable content. There are no options for formatting the text, but it does support some special character codes. The best way to understand plain text is to look at rich text, which is essentially plain text with all the accompanying information or metadata that carries the style information for font, color, links, and so on.
Exactly the way rich text adds all the attribute and style elements to plain text, HTML goes a step further by allowing you to include images, designs, videos, themes, and other advanced graphical elements. However, plain text is more dependable because it is device-agnostic. If you send an HTML email, for example, and the recipient's email application can't open it, it will default to plain text mode.
Next, let's look at some tools - both online and offline (downloadable) - that you can use to convert PDF into plain text. This is extremely useful when you want to review a document without any of the images or other graphical 'distractions' in a typical PDF element. It will extract the text alone and give that to you in a readable format; namely, a plain text file with a .txt extension.
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