How to convert e-book PDF to TXT: steps and precautions

Key points of this article

First use the mouse to drag a piece of text. If it can be selected, it is the text version. If it is not selected, it is probably the scanned version. It needs to be OCR recognized first.
Directly changing the PDF suffix to txt will not convert the content. The file will still have a PDF structure and will be garbled when opened.
Remove duplicate headers, footers and page numbers after exporting to Word, giving you more control over the results than directly converting to TXT.
Chapter titles should be divided into separate paragraphs with blank lines before and after. TXT has no format and relies on blank lines and the text itself to distinguish levels.
Select UTF-8 encoding when saving. After conversion, check the directory, spot-check sentence fragments, and check the proper nouns and numbers recognized by OCR.

Many people have an e-book in PDF format and want to convert it to TXT and then put it into a reader, import it into note-taking software, or do a full-text search. Changing the suffix name directly will not work. Only plain text can be stored in TXT. The header, page number and chapter format in the PDF will become garbled, or a large number of redundant blank lines will be left.

This article is written for readers who need to convert e-books to TXT, focusing on how to deal with the chapter structure and headers and footers. After reading, you will be able to judge which route your PDF is suitable for, know what to do at each step, and know where to check after finishing the conversion.

If you just want to quickly convert a short article without chapters, you can just copy and paste it. However, a book of several hundred pages will encounter problems such as double columns, repeated headers, and broken chapters, which need to be dealt with according to the following process.

What method is used to convert e-book PDF to TXT? One sentence conclusion

For most e-books, the result is more controllable by first exporting the PDF to Word, deleting the headers and footers, sorting out the chapter titles, and finally saving it as plain text. Direct one-click conversion using an online conversion website usually fails to retain the chapter hierarchy, and it is difficult to remove repeated headers.

your situation	Recommended practices	reason
Text version PDF, text can be selected	Export to Word, clean it, and then save it as TXT	Text can be extracted directly, and chapters and paragraphs can be organized paragraph by paragraph in Word.
Scanned PDF, the picture is selected	First perform OCR recognition, and then follow the same process.	The scanned document does not have a text layer and must be recognized first; the recognition result must be checked.
Lots of headers, footers and page numbers	Remove duplicate content first, then convert	Duplicate content will be mixed into the main text. The earlier it is deleted, the easier it will be.
Just plain text, no layout required	Save directly as plain text after cleaning	TXT does not retain formatting. Chapter titles must be marked by themselves with blank lines and text.
The book is very long and has many chapters	Split by chapters and processed separately	The larger a single file is, the more difficult it is to check, and it is easier to locate problems when processed separately.

Before you start: Confirm these points first

Confirm whether the PDF is a text version or a scanned version. Use the mouse to drag a section of text: if it can be selected and highlighted, it is the text version; if it cannot be selected or a whole image is selected, it is the scanned version. The scanned version has no text layer that can be extracted, and the directly transferred TXT is basically empty.
See clearly the complexity of the layout. Look out for double columns, footnotes, tables and figures. When converting a double-column book to TXT, the sentences in the left and right columns are easily spliced together, so you need to spend more time checking.
Clear the purpose of TXT. Whether used for the reader, retrieval, or importing notes determines how much structure you want to retain. For example, if you need to jump by chapter, the chapter title must be on a separate line.
Prepare the original book catalog. The table of contents is the basis for checking the number of chapters. It can help you find missing chapters and see whether the table of contents page and copyright page have been mistaken for the main text.
Only process e-books that you legally own. The conversion process will produce text copies, please only use them for personal reading, organization and retrieval, and do not distribute them to others at will.

Steps to export e-book PDF to Word in OmniDoc and then clean it up

The following steps are suitable for both text and scanned e-books. The desktop client can be downloaded from download.omnidoc.top. After installation, follow the following sequence.

Import PDF. Open the desktop client and load the e-book file to be converted. First make sure that the file can be displayed normally and that the page numbers are consistent with the original book.
Delete irrelevant pages. Use the page operation of the PDF editor to delete the cover page, copyright page, table of contents page and blank pages to prevent them from entering the main text.
Process the scanned version. If the text cannot be selected by dragging in the first step, use the OCR function to identify it first. After the recognition is completed, randomly select a few pages and check them against the original pictures to see if the typos and numbers are correct.
Export to Word. Use the export function to export PDF to Word format. Keep a backup of the original Word after exporting so you can fall back if something goes wrong.
Remove duplicate headers, footers and page numbers. First check the headers of the first few pages to confirm which content is the book title, author name or page number that is repeated on each page, and then use Word's search and replace to delete them uniformly.
Organize chapter titles. Divide titles such as "Chapter 1" into separate paragraphs, leaving a blank line before and after. After converting to TXT, the chapters can still be seen at a glance.
Merge disconnected sentences. When exporting for typesetting, paragraphs may be cut off by hard line breaks. Use find and replace to remove extra paragraph marks, and then check whether there is still half a sentence at the end of the line.
Save as plain text. In Word, choose to save as plain text (.txt) format, and select UTF-8 for encoding to avoid garbled Chinese characters.

Check each item after completion

After the conversion is completed, do not deliver it directly for use. The following checks can help you find most problems.

Check items	How to see	What to do if there is a problem
Number of chapters	Check the table of contents of the original book and confirm that the chapter titles are all there one by one.	When a chapter is missing, go back to Word and check whether the page was accidentally deleted or missed by OCR.
Header and footer residue	Search text for book titles, author names, and page numbers	Use find and replace to delete them all and search again.
Sentence and word segmentation	Randomly select three to five paragraphs and see if the end of the line breaks in the middle of the word	Merge paragraphs cut off by hard line breaks
Chinese garbled characters	Open it with Notepad or a text editor and see if a box or question mark appears.	Resave as UTF-8 encoding
OCR recognition error	Check proper nouns, numbers and formulas against the original diagram	Manual correction; important content must be checked paragraph by paragraph, machine recognition results may be incorrect
Cross-page continuity	Turn to the double page of the original book and compare whether the previous and following text are connected.	Check whether any double-column content is incorrectly spliced and adjust the order manually.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Can I directly change the suffix of PDF to txt?

Can't. Changing the suffix only changes the file name. The file content is still in the PDF structure. When opened with a text editor, the text will be garbled and the text cannot be obtained.

2. What is the difference between copying and pasting into Notepad and exporting and converting?

Copying and pasting is fast, but double columns, tables, and headers are easily mixed together, and the order of paragraphs is often disrupted. Exporting to Word first and then cleaning makes it easier to control the results of each step.

3. What should you look for when choosing a free conversion tool?

Check the file size limit, whether the conversion result is watermarked, whether the file will be uploaded to the server, and whether the paragraphs will be retained after conversion. When it comes to book manuscripts, give priority to methods that can be processed locally.

4. Is it accurate to convert scanned e-books to TXT?

Depends on original image clarity and format. OCR will inevitably cause typos, especially proper nouns and numbers, which need to be checked against the original image, and important content should be checked paragraph by paragraph.

📝 Summary

The key to converting e-book PDF to TXT is to first determine whether the PDF has a text layer, then export it to Word to clean up the header, footer and chapter structure, and finally save it as plain text using UTF-8. After mastering this method of converting pdf to txt e-book, the conversion result will be cleaner than direct one-click conversion, and will be more convenient for subsequent reading and retrieval.

Open OmniDoc and export the PDF content as an editable file