PDF to Text

PDF to Text is a small-sized application designed to help you extract text from PDF documents and create plain text documents. It works without Adobe Acrobat software, doesn't require installation, and has a feature for monitoring directories to perform conversions as soon as new files are detected.

The tool's wrapped in just one .exe that you can save anywhere on the computer or copy to an external storage unit to directly launch it on any machine without previous setup.

It doesn't modify Windows registry settings but auto-creates and updates an .ini file to remember your preferences, so make sure you're not firing it up from a write-protected device.

By the look of the interface that adopts the Windows style, it's clear that PDF to Text hasn't received updates for a very long time. In fact, the software project's no longer in development and cannot be purchased now.

However, you can still download the trial version from Softpedia. It didn't work on the latest Windows edition in our tests (the conversion button didn't do anything on click), but we managed to fix this issue by running it in compatibility mode for Windows XP.

The task list can be populated with as many PDFs as you want, thanks to the fact that batch processing is possible. This can be done by adding files or selecting folders whose containing items you want to convert while keeping in mind that there are no file filters available for excluding specific objects.

It's possible to specify the output folder, indicate a directory to monitor for automatic conversions, and ask the program to preserve the original text format during encoding jobs. Afterward, you can open the new files with Windows Notepad or another text viewer to inspect results.

Because the application's so old, we've encountered multiple issues in our tests, as we previously described. Moreover, it doesn't support newer PDF versions, making it unusable in many cases. Unfortunately, PDF to Text is unfitting for modern systems.