PDF Tools
OCR PDF
Extract text from scanned or image-based PDFs using optical character recognition.
Choose a scanned PDF or image-based PDF to extract text.
PDF Tools
Extract text from scanned or image-based PDFs using optical character recognition.
Choose a scanned PDF or image-based PDF to extract text.
OCR PDF is a text extraction tool that reads images of text (scanned pages, photographs of documents, or PDF pages rendered as images) and converts them into machine-readable text. The extracted text can be searched, copied, edited, and exported as a plain-text file. OCR is essential for digitizing paper archives, making scanned contracts searchable, or recovering text from low-quality or legacy PDF scans.
The tool processes your PDF by rendering each page as a high-resolution image, then applying optical character recognition via Tesseract.js to identify letters, numbers, and symbols. For each page, the tool overlays the extracted text and displays it in order. Once extraction completes, you can view the full text in a text area and download it as a .txt file. Quality depends on the scan resolution and clarity—crisp, high-contrast scans yield the best results.
Crisp, high-contrast scans at 200 DPI or higher work best. Blurry, low-resolution, or heavily skewed pages produce lower accuracy. Always scan at least at 150 DPI; 300 DPI is ideal for documents with small fonts.
No. This tool recognizes printed text only. Handwritten documents require specialized handwriting recognition, which is not included. For mixed handwritten/printed documents, results on printed portions may be acceptable.
Yes, the tool can recognize text on colored backgrounds and within tables. However, table structure (rows/columns) may not be preserved—text will be extracted sequentially. For complex table layouts, you may need to reformat after extraction.
This tool supports English (eng) recognition. Multi-language support is not currently available in this version.
Processing time depends on page count and image resolution. Expect 2–10 seconds per page on average. The tool shows progress updates as it works. Larger PDFs (10+ pages) may take 2–3 minutes.
No. The tool only recognizes text in rendered PDF pages. Standalone images uploaded separately would need conversion to PDF first, but photo-based PDFs (e.g. camera-photographed documents) will work.
Yes. Once extraction is complete, click 'Download as .txt' to save the text as a plain-text file you can open in any text editor.
No. All processing happens in your browser. Your PDF is never uploaded to any server—it is processed locally and then discarded. Completely private and secure.