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Convert PDF to Text by cloudHQ turns any PDF, scan, or screenshot in your Google Drive into clean plain text without leaving your browser
Why Plain Text - and Why a PDF Isn't Enough
PDF is built for looking right, not for being read by machines. Text in a PDF is scattered across drawing instructions, broken into positioned fragments, and - in scanned documents - not text at all, just a picture of text. That makes PDFs slow and expensive for AI tools to process, painful to search across in bulk, and nearly useless as training data.
A plain TXT file is the opposite: every tool on earth can read it. AI models ingest it efficiently with no layout noise, search tools index it instantly, scripts and parsers process it line by line, and it stays readable forever. Convert PDF to Text gives you that clean, universal format from any PDF or image in one click.
Scanned PDFs, Photos, and Screenshots - Our OCR Reads Them All
Many PDFs contain no extractable text at all: they are scans - images of paper documents. Convert PDF to Text runs every page through a massively scalable OCR engine, so scanned contracts, faxed forms, photographed receipts, and screenshots come out as clean, ordered text just like a born-digital PDF would.
Because the OCR runs on cloudHQ's distributed pipeline, it scales from a single page to thousands of documents without breaking a sweat - there's no desktop OCR software to install and no per-page upload ritual on some ad-supported website.
Redact PII Before the Text Ever Leaves the Document
Need the content but not the personal data? Turn on redaction and choose exactly which information types should be removed from the extracted text:
- Person names
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Physical addresses
- Social Security numbers
- Bank account numbers
- Credit card numbers
- ...or any other information you specify
One Text File per Folder - Updated Automatically
Optionally, Convert PDF to Text maintains a file called files_in_this_folder_as_text.txt inside each folder you work with. Every time you convert a file in that folder, its text is automatically added to the combined file - so the folder always carries an up-to-date, single-file text version of everything in it.
Feed that one file to an AI assistant to ask questions about the whole folder, grep it during an audit, or attach it to a ticket - no stitching together dozens of individual TXT files.
Or One Text File for Your Entire Google Drive
Take it one step further: enable files_in_this_google_drive_as_text.txt and every file you convert anywhere in your Google Drive is automatically appended to a single Drive-wide text file.
It's the simplest possible knowledge base: one plain-text file containing everything you've converted, always current, ready to be loaded into an AI model, indexed by a search tool, or archived for compliance.
Built for AI: Training Data and Document Q&A
AI models are remarkably inefficient at processing PDFs: layout noise wastes tokens, scanned pages are invisible without OCR, and multi-column layouts scramble the reading order. Plain text fixes all of that.
Use Convert PDF to Text to prepare AI training corpora from your document archives, to build clean context files for retrieval and document Q&A, or - combined with PII redaction - to create text you can safely send to an AI service to extract exactly the information you need.
Search Every Document You Have - Audits Made Simple
When an audit, due-diligence request, or internal investigation lands on your desk, the question is always the same: which documents mention X? Once your PDFs and scans are plain text, the answer is one search away - in Google Drive's own search, in your favorite editor, or with a one-line script across the auto-updated folder text files. No more opening documents one by one to find a clause, an account number, or a name.
Turn Screenshots and Receipts into Data
Screenshots of receipts, invoices, order confirmations, and forms are just pixels - until you OCR them. Convert PDF to Text turns a folder of receipt photos into text files that your expense tooling, bookkeeping scripts, or AI assistant can actually parse and process. Snap it, drop it in Drive, convert, done.
Try It Free - 20 Files, No Credit Card
Every account starts with a free trial that lets you convert up to 20 documents - no credit card required. That's enough to convert a real folder of contracts or a month of receipts and verify the text quality, the OCR accuracy, and the redaction before you commit. When you're ready to convert at scale, upgrading unlocks unlimited conversions.
Here are just a few ways professionals use it every day:
How You Can Use Convert PDF to Text
AI and Data Teams
Training and retrieval pipelines want clean text, not PDFs. Data teams batch-convert entire Drive folders - including scanned material - into TXT, with PII redaction switched on, and get corpora that are safe to use and cheap to tokenize.
Compliance and Audit Teams
When the audit request comes, every relevant folder already has a files_in_this_folder_as_text.txt with the complete, searchable content of every document. Finding every mention of an account, a vendor, or a clause takes seconds instead of days.
Legal Professionals
Discovery sets, contracts, and exhibits arrive as scans more often than not. Attorneys and paralegals OCR whole case folders to text, search across everything at once, and use redacted text versions when documents need to be shared or analyzed by AI tools.
Accountants and Bookkeepers
Clients send receipts as photos and invoices as scans. Bookkeepers convert them to text in bulk so amounts, dates, and vendors can be parsed straight into the books - no more retyping from screenshots.
Researchers and Archivists
Decades of papers, reports, and historical documents become a searchable, machine-readable corpus. The Drive-wide text file turns an entire archive into a single document an AI assistant can answer questions about.
HR Teams
Resumes, signed policies, and personnel forms get converted to text for fast search and structured processing - with names, addresses, and Social Security numbers redacted whenever the text leaves the HR folder.
Operations and Admin Teams
Purchase orders, delivery notes, and signed forms become text the moment they land in the shared folder, and the folder's combined text file keeps a running, searchable log of everything that came in.
Small Business Owners
One tool that turns paperwork - quotes, contracts, receipts, screenshots - into text you can search, paste into AI chats, and keep organized, without buying desktop OCR software.
No matter your field, Convert PDF to Text turns documents that only humans could read
into text that every tool - and every AI - can work with.
Frequently Asked Questions
What file types can I convert to text?
My PDF is a scan - just images of paper. Will it work?
What information can be redacted from the text?
What are files_in_this_folder_as_text.txt and files_in_this_google_drive_as_text.txt?
- files_in_this_folder_as_text.txt lives inside a folder and automatically accumulates the text of every file you convert in that folder.
- files_in_this_google_drive_as_text.txt does the same for your entire Google Drive - every file you convert anywhere is appended automatically.
Why convert documents to text for AI?
Where do my converted files end up?
- In your Google Drive, next to the source file, so your text copies live alongside the originals (and, if enabled, in the combined folder or Drive text file).
- On your computer. Each converted file is also downloaded to your machine, so you can drop it into a pipeline or attach it without an extra step.
Can I convert many files at once?
What happens to the original file?
Is my data secure?
- The conversion and OCR run on cloudHQ's own servers - your documents are never handed to a third-party conversion service.
- Files are held only for the brief moment needed to perform the conversion and are removed from our processing servers after the job completes.
- All communication with cloud services is encrypted via TLS.
- We never store passwords for cloud services. Authentication is handled via OAuth and OpenID, ensuring secure access without compromising your credentials.
- Our software and infrastructure are regularly updated with the latest security patches, and our network is protected by an enterprise-class firewall.
Is there a free version? How does pricing work?
Testimonials
“We're building an internal AI assistant on top of fifteen years of project documents, and most of them are scanned PDFs. Convert PDF to Text OCR'd the whole archive straight from Google Drive, and the per-folder text files meant our retrieval pipeline had clean input from day one. The PII redaction was the feature that got the project past our security review.”
- Elena Vasquez, Head of Data Engineering
“During our last audit we were asked which contracts contained a specific indemnification clause. Because every folder already had its files_in_this_folder_as_text.txt, we answered in an afternoon what used to take a week of opening PDFs one by one. This tool quietly became part of our compliance workflow.”
- Thomas Becker, Internal Audit Manager