OCR PDF
Extract text from scanned PDFs and images. Supports both digital and scanned documents.
How to OCR a PDF
- Upload a scanned PDF or image file
- Click "Extract Text" to start OCR
- Review and download the extracted text as TXT or DOCX
Note: OCR processing happens entirely in your browser. Large documents may take longer to process.
Why use our OCR tool?
Our OCR tool runs entirely in your browser using Tesseract.js. No files are uploaded to any server — your documents stay private. Works with both scanned PDFs and images.
Related Tools
What Is OCR and When to Use It
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extracts editable text from scanned documents and images. Use it when you have a PDF created from a scanner — the pages look like text but are actually images. Lawyers digitize paper contracts, researchers extract quotes from scanned books, and archivists make historical documents searchable.
Our OCR tool uses Tesseract.js (the most popular open-source OCR engine) running entirely in your browser. It supports English text recognition for both PDFs and image files (JPG, PNG, BMP, WebP).
Tips for Accurate OCR
For best results, use scanned documents with clean, high-contrast text at 300 DPI or higher. The tool first attempts to extract embedded text (for digital PDFs) and only runs OCR on pages where text extraction yields fewer than 30 characters. This hybrid approach is fast for mixed documents.
Results can be downloaded as plain text (TXT) or formatted Word document (DOCX) using the docx library. Processing time depends on page count and image size — large documents may take several seconds.
Technical Specifications
- Input formats: PDF (.pdf), JPG, PNG, and other common image formats
- Output: Extracted searchable text with confidence scoring
- OCR engine: Tesseract.js (trained LSTM models)
- Language support: English by default, with 100+ languages available (auto-detect from document)
- File limit: Up to 50 MB per file
- Processing: 100% client-side — scanned pages never leave your device