Free, Private Document Conversion

Archivist includes a powerful document-to-text converter that works entirely on your computer — no internet, no accounts, no file size limits, no cost.

Even if you never use Archivist for anything else, the Pre-Process tab is a useful tool on its own.

The Problem

You have a 200-page PDF report and you want to paste the text into ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI tool. But copying from a PDF is messy — formatting breaks, tables get scrambled, page headers end up in the middle of sentences.

Or maybe you have a stack of Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and scanned images, and you just need clean text from all of them.

Online conversion tools exist, but they often:

Require uploading your files to someone else's server
Have file size limits or page caps
Charge for batch processing
Don't support obscure formats

What Archivist Offers

Drop your files into the Pre-Process tab and get clean, readable text back in seconds. No upload to any server. No file size restrictions. No per-page fees.

50+ supported formats — PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, HTML pages, images, and more. If it has text in it, Archivist can probably extract it.

OCR built in — Scanned documents and photos of text? Archivist can read those too using optical character recognition. Just click Force OCR for documents that are image-based rather than text-based.

Batch processing — Drop in a dozen files at once. Archivist processes them all and shows you per-file results with timing and throughput statistics so you can see exactly how fast your machine handled it.

Download as text or Markdown — Save individual files or download everything at once. Markdown format preserves structure like headings and lists; plain text gives you the raw content.

Use It As a Standalone Tool

You don't need to upload anything to Archivist's database to use this feature. The Pre-Process tab works independently:

Drop in your files
Click Convert (or Force OCR for scanned documents)
Review the extracted text right in the app
Download what you need

Take the converted text and use it anywhere — paste it into another AI tool, save it for your records, or feed it into whatever workflow you have. Archivist doesn't lock you in.

Of course, if you want to go further and load those documents into Archivist for AI-powered search, the Upload tab is the next step.