PDF to Text

PDF to Text is a handy little app that helps you pull text out of PDF documents and turn them into plain text files. The best part? You don’t need Adobe Acrobat to use it, and there’s no installation needed! It even has a cool feature that lets it watch certain folders. So, as soon as you drop a new PDF in there, it’ll convert it right away.

Easy to Use and Portable

This tool comes in one tiny .exe file. You can toss it on your computer or even put it on a USB drive so you can run it anywhere without any setup. How convenient is that?

No Registry Changes Needed

It’s designed not to mess with your Windows registry settings. Instead, it creates an .ini file that saves your preferences automatically. Just make sure you're not running it from a write-protected device!

A Classic Interface

The interface looks pretty old-school—like something from the early days of Windows. Unfortunately, PDF to Text hasn’t seen any updates for quite some time and is no longer being developed or sold.

Download the Trial Version

You can still grab the trial version from Softpedia. In our tests, we found that it didn't work well on the latest Windows versions at first (the conversion button was just sitting there doing nothing). But we got around this by running it in compatibility mode for Windows XP.

Batch Processing Capability

You can add as many PDFs as you want to the task list since batch processing is supported! Just add files or choose folders with the PDFs you want converted. Keep in mind, though, there are no filters available if you want to skip certain files.

Output Options Galore!

You get to pick where the output files go! Plus, you can set up a folder for automatic conversions and choose whether or not to keep the original text format when converting. After it's done, just open your new files with Notepad or any other text viewer to check out what you've got.

A Few Hiccups

Since this app is pretty old now, we've run into some problems during testing. It also doesn’t support newer versions of PDFs which makes it less useful for many people today. Sadly, PDF to Text isn't really suited for modern systems anymore.