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Overview

ToText() extracts the content of a document as a plain text string — no Markdown syntax, no bounding boxes, no metadata. It’s the simplest output format and the right choice when your downstream tool doesn’t need formatting or structure, just the words. 
using PDF4LLM;

string text = PdfExtractor.ToText("document.pdf");
Console.WriteLine(text);

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When to use plain text

Use caseRecommended format
Search indexing✅ Plain text
Keyword extraction / NLP✅ Plain text
LLM summarisation (simple)✅ Plain text
RAG pipelines with chunking⚠️ Consider Markdown or page chunks
Preserving document structure❌ Use Markdown
Custom layout pipelines❌ Use JSON
If you’re feeding content into an LLM and document structure matters — headings, lists, tables — use ToMarkdown() instead. LLMs handle Markdown well and the added structure improves output quality.

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Page selection

Extract only the pages you need: 
string text = PdfExtractor.ToText(
    "document.pdf",
    pages: new List<int> { 0, 1, 2 }
);

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Per-page chunks

Use LlamaMarkdownReader to return one document object per page instead of a single concatenated string. Each chunk includes the page’s plain text and a metadata dictionary with the page number and source file path: 
var reader = PdfExtractor.LlamaMarkdownReader();
var chunks = reader.LoadData("document.pdf");

foreach (var chunk in chunks)
{
    int    page     = (int)chunk.ExtraInfo["page"];
    string text     = chunk.Text;

    Console.WriteLine($"Page {page}: {text.Length} chars");
}
Each chunk’s Text property contains the plain Markdown for that page. For plain text specifically, strip Markdown syntax after loading, or call ToText per page using the pages parameter: 
using MuPDF.NET;

Document doc    = new Document("document.pdf");
var      chunks = new List<(int Page, string Text)>();

for (int i = 0; i < doc.PageCount; i++)
{
    string pageText = PdfExtractor.ToText(doc, pages: new List<int> { i });
    chunks.Add((i, pageText));
}

doc.Close();

foreach (var chunk in chunks)
    Console.WriteLine($"Page {chunk.Page}: {chunk.Text.Length} chars");

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Saving to a file

Write the output to a .txt file: 
using System.IO;
using PDF4LLM;

string text = PdfExtractor.ToText("document.pdf");
File.WriteAllText("output.txt", text, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
To save each page as a separate file: 
using MuPDF.NET;
using System.IO;

Document doc = new Document("document.pdf");
Directory.CreateDirectory("output");

for (int i = 0; i < doc.PageCount; i++)
{
    string pageText = PdfExtractor.ToText(doc, pages: new List<int> { i });
    File.WriteAllText($"output/page-{i}.txt", pageText, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
}

doc.Close();

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OCR behaviour

Like ToMarkdown(), ToText() can invoke Tesseract OCR on pages that contain no selectable text. Pass useOcr: true to enable it: 
// Enable OCR on all pages
string text = PdfExtractor.ToText("document.pdf", useOcr: true);

// Enable OCR with a specific language
string text = PdfExtractor.ToText("document.pdf", useOcr: true, ocrLanguage: "fra");
See OCR for a full walkthrough of Tesseract installation, language codes, and patterns for mixed documents.
For the full API signature, see the ToText() API reference.

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Next steps

Extract Markdown

Preserve structure and formatting for LLM pipelines.

Extract JSON

Access bounding boxes and layout data for custom pipelines.

OCR

Control OCR behaviour and language configuration.