Turn any PDF in Chrome into
clean, copyable text.

Extracts structured Markdown from PDFs that Chrome's native viewer mangles. Runs 100% locally via WebAssembly. No uploads. No servers. No tracking.

Install from Chrome Web Store Free. Open source engine. 1.1 MB total.

How it works

  1. Open any PDF in Chrome. Navigate to a .pdf URL. Chrome's native viewer loads as usual. The PDF to Text icon shows a blue badge while it pre-fetches the bytes in the background.
  2. Click "Open in PDF to Text." The popup offers one-click extraction. No auto-redirect, no overriding your preferred viewer. Your choice, every time.
  3. Copy the clean text. The viewer shows extracted text with headings, paragraphs, and a Table of Contents auto-detected from font sizes. Copy as plain text, basic Markdown, or structured Markdown with YAML frontmatter and token counts.

What you get

Privacy
Everything runs locally. The PDF bytes go from your browser to a WebAssembly module and back. Zero network calls to any server we control. Zero analytics. Zero telemetry.
Rescued glyphs
A 7-level fallback cascade recovers text from PDFs with broken Unicode mappings, missing ToUnicode CMaps, subset-embedded fonts, and ligature encoding bugs. The glyphs Chrome would show as gibberish come out as real words.
Agent-ready
Browser automation tools (Playwright, Puppeteer, Claude in Chrome) can read window.__glyph.markdown.structured directly. No API key. No rate limit. No server.

Use with your AI agent

One command installs the engine and a skill for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, or Copilot. Your agent then calls it whenever you ask about a PDF. Everything runs locally. 

curl -fsSL https://jordancoin.github.io/pdf-to-text/install.sh | bash

Pick a specific agent or scope on the install page. Claude Code users can also /plugin install pdf-to-text@JordanCoin/pdf-to-text for MCP tools.

Install

Chrome Web Store →

Link will be live once the extension passes Chrome Web Store review. Free. No account required. 1.1 MB download.

Privacy

Your PDFs never leave your device. PDF to Text runs entirely in your browser using a local engine. We collect only anonymous performance stats (extraction time, page count) to improve the tool. No PDF content, no URLs, no identity.

Read the full privacy policy →