Free Online PDF OCR

About PDF OCR

Every text-extraction tool on this site — PDF to Text, PDF to Markdown, PDF to CSV, and others — relies on a PDF's embedded text layer, but plenty of real-world PDFs don't have one: a photocopied document scanned to PDF, a photo of a page saved as PDF, or an old document that was never digitally typed in the first place. Those files are, as far as a computer is concerned, just pictures — this tool is the one built specifically to read text out of pictures like that.

It uses a real, well-established optical character recognition engine (Tesseract, running as WebAssembly directly in your browser via the tesseract.js library) to analyze each rendered page image and recognize the English text it contains, character by character, the same underlying recognition technology used in many commercial and open-source OCR products.

Each page of the uploaded PDF is first rendered to a high-resolution image, then passed through the OCR engine one page at a time, with live progress shown as recognition proceeds (which page is being processed, and a percentage complete for the current page) since this is genuinely more computationally intensive than simple text extraction and can take real time on longer documents.

The recognition engine itself runs entirely on your device using WebAssembly — the only network activity involved is a one-time download of a small English language model file the first time you use the tool (needed for the recognition engine to know what English characters and words look like), after which the actual OCR processing of your document's content happens fully locally, with no image or text data ever leaving your browser.

How it works

1. Upload your scanned PDF. Works on image-only pages with no embedded text layer.
2. Pages are rendered and recognized. Each page renders to an image, then the OCR engine reads its text.
3. Copy or download the recognized text. Get the extracted text as plain text, ready to use.