Scanned PDF Text Extractor
Recognize Text From Image-Only PDF Pages
Need to use Scanned PDF Text Extractor right now?
Regular text extraction needs an embedded text layer — this reads the page images directly instead.
Drop a PDF, or click to browse
Processed locally in your browser — never uploaded
Renders each page to an image and recognizes text with an in-browser OCR engine (English) — built for scanned pages and image-only PDFs that have no embedded text layer. The first run downloads a small language model; recognition itself happens entirely on your device.
Features
- Runs entirely in your browser
- Privacy-first — your data is never uploaded
- Real-time, instant results
- 100% free, no sign-up required
- Works on desktop, tablet, and mobile
- No installation needed
Who uses this tool?
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About Scanned PDF Text Extractor
Regular text-extraction tools rely on a PDF's embedded text layer, but scanned documents and photographed pages saved as PDF don't have one — they're just pictures as far as a computer is concerned. This tool is built specifically for that case, using a real OCR engine (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly) to read text directly from each page's rendered image.
Every page is rendered to a high-resolution image, then passed through the OCR engine one page at a time, with live progress shown since this is genuinely more computationally intensive than simple text extraction and can take real time on longer documents.
The recognition itself runs entirely on your device using WebAssembly — the only network activity is a one-time download of a small English language model, after which your document's content and its recognized text never leave your browser.
This is the same underlying engine used by our PDF OCR tool under a different name, matching how this feature is commonly searched for — the result and behavior are identical either way.
How it works
- Upload your scanned PDF. Works on image-only pages with no embedded text layer.
- Pages are rendered and recognized. Each page renders to an image, then the OCR engine reads its text.
- Copy or download the recognized text. Get the extracted text as plain text, ready to use.
Examples
Reading text from a scanned letter
Input
5-page scanned PDF with no text layer
Output
recognized plain text from all 5 pages