How to OCR a Scanned PDF for Free

July 9, 2026

Scanned PDFs are essentially images of pages. You can view them, but you cannot select, copy, or search the text. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solves this by analyzing the image and extracting the text.

When to Use OCR

OCR is useful when you have scanned contracts, old books, faxed documents, or any printed material that was digitized as an image PDF. Lawyers digitize paper contracts for text search. Researchers extract quotes from scanned books. Archivists make historical documents searchable and accessible.

How Our OCR Tool Works

Our tool uses Tesseract.js, the most popular open-source OCR engine, running entirely in your browser. It first checks if the PDF already has embedded text (for hybrid digital-scanned documents). If text is found, it skips OCR for speed. For truly scanned pages, it renders the page at high resolution and runs Tesseract to extract the text.

Tips for Accurate Results

For best accuracy, use clean scans at 300 DPI or higher with good contrast between text and background. Black text on white paper works best. Colored backgrounds, watermarks, and decorative fonts reduce accuracy. Results can be downloaded as plain text or formatted Word documents.

Try It Now

Use our free OCR PDF tool. No upload, no signup — your documents stay private in your browser.