OCR PDF
Extract text from a scanned or image-based PDF using optical character recognition, entirely in your browser. Also works as an "extract text from PDF with OCR" tool. Free and private.
Click to select a PDF file, or drag and drop
Your file never leaves your browserHow to OCR a PDF and Extract Text
- Upload a scanned or image-based PDF — one where the regular PDF to Text tool would find no text layer.
- Click Extract Text with OCR. Each page is rendered to an image, then run through an optical character recognition engine right in your browser.
- Watch the per-page progress indicator — OCR is slower than plain text extraction, taking several seconds per page.
- Copy the recognized text or download it as a
.txtfile once processing finishes.
OCR PDF vs. Extract Text from PDF — which do I need?
If your PDF was created from a word processor or has selectable text, use the regular PDF to Text tool — it's instant and more accurate since it reads the text layer directly. This tool, OCR PDF (also called extract text from PDF with OCR), is for PDFs made of scanned pages or photographs of documents, where there's no text layer to read — every character has to be visually recognized from the page image instead.
Example
A 4-page contract that was scanned on a photocopier has no selectable text — the regular text extractor returns nothing. Running it through OCR PDF recognizes the printed characters page by page and produces plain text you can search, copy, or paste elsewhere, separated by --- Page 1 --- style markers.
Common Use Cases
- Making a scanned document's text searchable and copyable for the first time.
- Pulling text out of a photographed receipt, form, or printed page saved as a PDF.
- Digitizing old paper records that only exist as scanned image PDFs.
FAQ
- How accurate is the OCR? It depends heavily on scan quality — clear, non-skewed, high-contrast scans of printed (not handwritten) text give the best results. Blurry, rotated, low-resolution, or handwritten pages will produce more errors.
- Does this support languages other than English? Not in this version — recognition currently runs in English only. The underlying OCR engine supports many other language packs, but they aren't wired up here yet to keep the tool simple and fast to load.
- Why is this so much slower than PDF to Text? Regular text extraction just reads an existing text layer instantly. OCR has to visually analyze every page as an image and recognize each character, which genuinely takes real computation — several seconds per page is normal.
- Does this preserve layout, like tables or columns? No — recognized text comes out in reading order as plain text, without the original layout, similar to the regular text extractor.
- Is my file uploaded anywhere? No — rendering and OCR both run entirely in your browser. The OCR engine and language data are downloaded once from a public CDN on first use, but your PDF itself is never sent anywhere.