PDF OCR
Turn scanned PDF pages into real, searchable and copyable text — right in your browser.
- Secure upload
- Deleted after processing
- No watermark
Click to upload or drag and drop
A single PDF, up to ~50MB — best on scanned or image-based pages
About the pdf ocr
This free online PDF OCR tool turns scanned pages, photographed documents and image-only PDFs into real, selectable, searchable text — using optical character recognition running entirely inside your browser. It's built for exactly the gap the regular PDF-to-text tool can't fill: a document made of pixels, not embedded text, has nothing for a text-layer extractor to read. OCR looks at what each page actually looks like and recognizes the letters, the same way a human eye reads a scanned page, then hands back the words as genuine editable text.
Under the hood it uses Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine originally developed at HP and now maintained by Google — the same recognition technology behind countless scanning apps — compiled to WebAssembly so it runs directly on your device with no upload required. Each page renders at a higher resolution than a typical thumbnail preview specifically to give the engine the sharpest possible source image, since OCR accuracy depends heavily on how crisp the input is.
A live progress bar tracks recognition page by page, since OCR is genuinely more computationally intensive than reading an embedded text layer — the trade-off for turning pixels into real text without a server doing the work. Once it finishes, you get the same word count, character count and copy/download workflow as a text extractor, plus something a plain extractor can't offer: an average confidence score, so you know at a glance whether the recognition was clean or whether a blurry scan might need a manual once-over.
Because every step — rendering pages, running the OCR model and assembling the result — happens locally in your browser, the document is never uploaded anywhere. That makes it a solid choice for scanned contracts, ID documents, old records, handwritten-adjacent forms and any paper trail you'd rather not send to a server, and results are given as plain text you can copy straight into a document, search, or save as a standalone .txt file.
Key features
- Real OCR — recognizes text from scanned or image-only pages, not just embedded text layers
- Powered by Tesseract, running fully in-browser via WebAssembly — no upload required
- Live per-page progress bar plus an average confidence score for the whole document
- Copy to clipboard or download the recognized text as a standalone .txt file
Common use cases
Scanned contracts & forms
Turn a scanned agreement or paper form into searchable, copyable text without retyping it.
Old records & archives
Make photographed or scanned historical documents searchable and reusable as plain text.
Receipts & printed documents
Pull text out of a phone-photographed receipt, letter or printed page saved as a PDF.
Accessibility & indexing
Convert image-only PDFs into text so they can be searched, read by a screen reader, or indexed.
How to use it
- 1Upload a scanned or image-based PDF — pages render at high resolution automatically.
- 2Watch the live progress bar as the OCR engine reads each page in turn.
- 3Review the recognized text, word count and average confidence score.
- 4Click Copy all text, or Download as .txt to save the result.
Supported formats & limits
Accepts any non-encrypted PDF up to roughly 50MB. Recognizes English text at each page's rendered resolution; output is UTF-8 plain text.
Privacy & security
OCR runs fully in your browser using Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly — the PDF is never uploaded to a server.
FAQ
- Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
- No. Page rendering and text recognition both run entirely in your browser — the file never leaves your device.
- How is this different from the PDF to Text Converter?
- PDF to Text reads a PDF's existing embedded text layer, which only works if the document has real text. PDF OCR visually recognizes text from scanned or image-only pages that have no text layer at all.
- Why does OCR take longer than a regular text extraction?
- Recognizing text visually, page by page, is far more computationally intensive than reading an already-embedded text layer — especially since it all runs on your device rather than a server.
- What does the confidence score mean?
- It's Tesseract's own estimate of how certain it is about the recognized text, averaged across all pages — lower scores usually mean a blurrier scan worth double-checking manually.
- Does it support languages other than English?
- The current version recognizes English text. For other languages, use a scan with clear, high-contrast printed text for the best results.