You have a PDF and you need the words, not the page design. Opening it, selecting, copying, and pasting into Notepad works until the file is long, or the selection jumps around columns, or your reader will not let you copy at all.
If the PDF was saved from Word, a website, or a printer driver, it usually already stores the characters. That is the text layer. A converter can read it and hand you a .txt file. You lose columns and pictures. You keep the wording.
When this works
Reports, letters, exported invoices, and most “Save as PDF” files. You can highlight a sentence in a normal reader. If you can highlight it, there is something to extract.
The output will not look like the original page. A two-column newsletter often becomes one long stream. Tables turn into lines of words. That is fine if you are going to edit the text anyway.
When it fails
A phone photo of a contract, or a scanner job, is an image sitting inside a PDF wrapper. There are no characters to copy. Extraction comes back empty or as junk. You need optical character recognition for that, which this site does not run on that page.
Password-protected files also fail until you unlock them. Extract after you have an open copy.
Text file or Word file?
Use PDF to Text when you want a clean dump for search, email, or another tool. Use PDF to Word if you still want paragraphs in a .docx you can open in Word. Neither rebuilds a designed layout. Both need a real text layer.
One PDF, up to 25 MB. The file is uploaded to extract the text and then discarded.