OCR PDF

About OCR for PDFs

Some PDFs have no text inside them at all. A scanned contract, a photographed receipt, a fax, an old book from a library scanner — each page is just a picture of text. You can read it, but you cannot select it, copy it or search it.

OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that. It looks at the picture of each page, recognises the shapes of the letters, and gives you back real text you can copy, edit and search.

This tool does it page by page and shows the text as each page is finished, so you do not have to wait for the whole document before you start.

Everything happens on your device

Scanned PDFs are often the private ones: an ID, a bank letter, a medical form, a signed contract. Most online OCR services want you to upload them.

This one does not. The OCR engine (Tesseract, the open-source engine behind many professional tools) runs inside your browser:

• Private — the PDF never leaves your device
• No sign-up, no page limit, no watermark

The first run downloads the engine and the language data — a few megabytes. Your browser keeps them, so the next run starts faster.

Text pages and scanned pages in one file

Many PDFs are mixed. Typed pages with one scanned signature page at the end. A scan that someone already ran OCR on. A report with a few photographed pages in the middle.

By default the tool checks each page first:

• A page that already has real text is copied as it is — exact, instant, no OCR mistakes
• A page that is only a picture is read with OCR

At the end you see how many pages went each way. Untick "Pages that already have real text" to force OCR on every page — useful when the old text layer is wrong or garbled.

Getting the best result

OCR is very good, but it is reading a picture, so the picture matters:

• Pick the right language. It changes which letters and accents the engine expects. French text read as English loses its é and ç.
• Straight, sharp pages read best. A crooked phone photo or a blurry fax gives more mistakes.
• Normal printed text reads well. Handwriting, very small print and decorative fonts read poorly.
• Tables come out as lines of text, not as a table. For a table, check the columns afterwards.
• Always read the result before you rely on it. Watch for 1 / l / I, 0 / O and rn / m — the classic OCR mix-ups.

What people use it for

• Copying a paragraph out of a scanned contract or a letter
• Getting the text of an old book or article that only exists as a scan
• Making a receipt or invoice scan searchable in your notes
• Pulling quotes from scanned research papers and handouts
• Typing up forms and records without retyping them by hand
• Turning a faxed document into something you can edit

Good to know

• A password-protected PDF must be unlocked first — use Unlock PDF
• Big documents take time: roughly 2–10 seconds per page on a computer, longer on a phone. Use Pages to read only the part you need
• Stop keeps every page already read
• The result is plain text. To get the text into Word, paste it, or use PDF to Word for PDFs that already have text
• If your PDF has real text on every page, PDF to Text is faster and has more layout options

Frequently asked questions

Is it free?

Yes. No sign-up, no page limit, no watermark.

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. The pages are drawn and read inside this page, on your own device.

Which languages does it read?

English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese (simplified), Japanese and Korean. Choose one before you start.

Why are there mistakes in the text?

OCR guesses each letter from its shape. A blurry, crooked or low-resolution scan makes it guess wrong more often. Check the result, and fix the few mistakes in the box before you copy it.

Can it make my PDF searchable?

Not yet — it gives you the text as a separate .txt file. Your original PDF is not changed.

How to use it

• Click Click to upload, or drag your scanned PDF onto the box
• Choose the language of the text
• Type a page range if you only need some pages — or leave it empty for all
• Click Read the text and watch the pages come in
• Check the text, then click Copy or Download .txt

Related tools

• PDF to Text — for PDFs that already contain real text
• Image to Text — the same OCR for a photo or a screenshot
• PDF to Word — turn a text PDF into an editable document
• PDF to JPG — save the scanned pages as images
• Compress PDF — make a heavy scan smaller
• Unlock PDF — remove a password before reading