OCR PDF — Extract Text
Extract text from scanned PDFs using OCR. Free, no upload — all processing in your browser.
Your files never leave your device. All processing happens in your browser. We don't upload, store, or access your files.
Your PDF stays on your device. A language model (~15 MB) is downloaded once to enable text recognition — no file data is sent.
Drop your scanned PDF here or click to browse
PDF files — works best with scanned documents
How to Use
- 1Select the OCR language matching your document
- 2Drop your scanned PDF into the upload area or click to browse
- 3Wait while each page is processed — OCR runs entirely in your browser
- 4Copy the extracted text to clipboard or download as a .txt file
Need more detail? Read our complete guide.
About This Tool
Extract text from scanned or image-based PDFs using Tesseract.js OCR, entirely in your browser. Choose from 9 languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean. The OCR language model (~15 MB) is downloaded once and cached by your browser — your PDF file itself is never sent anywhere. Results can be copied to clipboard or downloaded as a .txt file.
Frequently Asked Questions
What quality can I expect from OCR text extraction?
OCR accuracy depends on the quality of the scanned document. Clean, high-resolution scans with standard fonts typically yield 90-99% accuracy. Blurry scans, handwriting, or unusual fonts will produce lower accuracy. For best results, use a scan resolution of at least 300 DPI.
Which languages are supported?
We support 9 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean. Select the correct language before processing — this significantly improves recognition accuracy.
What is the difference between scanned PDFs and text PDFs?
A text PDF contains actual text characters that can be selected and copied directly. A scanned PDF contains images of pages (like a photo of a document) with no selectable text. OCR is needed for scanned PDFs to extract the text from the page images.
Is my PDF sent to a server for OCR processing?
No. Your PDF stays on your device. The Tesseract.js OCR engine and the language model (~15 MB) are downloaded to your browser once and cached. All text recognition happens locally in your browser — your file is never uploaded.