OCR PDF

A scanned PDF is little more than a picture on each page — readable to the eye but invisible to search. OCR, or optical character recognition, turns those images into real text you can copy, search, and save. This tool runs the Tesseract OCR engine directly in your browser, so your scans and photos are recognized on your own device and never uploaded anywhere. The result is plain text you can review on screen, copy, or download as a TXT file.

Text You Can Actually Use

Once a document has been through OCR, the words on each page stop being pixels and become editable characters. That changes what you can do with the file. You can pull a quote out of a scanned contract, search an old report for a specific term, or paste a paragraph from a photographed page into an email without retyping a single line.

The tool works with PDFs and with common image formats, so a photo of a whiteboard or a JPG screenshot of a document is fair game. Results are organized page by page, and for PDFs the tool renders each page at a sharp scale before recognition to give the engine the best possible input. That extra rendering step matters: a cleaner image means fewer misread characters.

Recognition focuses on English text, which covers most business and academic scans. Multi-page PDFs are handled automatically, one page at a time, so even a long document flows through without you needing to split it first.

How to Extract Text

1. Click the upload area or drag a scanned PDF or image file into the tool. PDF, JPG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF are all accepted.
2. Press recognize text and wait while each page is processed; the progress label reports which page is being recognized.
3. Review the extracted text in the results panel, which groups content with page breaks so you can find a specific section.
4. Copy the full text to your clipboard or download it as a TXT file for later use.

You can recognize another document any time without reloading the page. The tool clears the previous result when you pick a new file, keeping the workflow fast and uncluttered.

What OCR Gives You

• The result is plain text, so it is easy to paste into documents, spreadsheets, and chat messages.
• Each page is processed separately, so results stay organized and easy to spot-check.
• Supported inputs include PDF, JPG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF files.
• Text that cannot be read clearly is flagged as such rather than guessed at silently.
• Processing runs entirely in the browser, so confidential documents stay on your machine.
• The result is downloaded as a TXT file, keeping the workflow simple.

Note that the output is extracted text rather than a re-rendered PDF. If you need a searchable PDF with an invisible text layer, the plain text you get here still gives you the content to work with, and you can keep it as a record or feed it into the next step of your process.

Good Uses for Extracted Text

Digitizing a printed form so its data can be typed into a database, pulling meeting notes out of a photographed whiteboard, and turning a scanned article into a quote you can paste are all common uses. Anything where the goal is the words rather than the page layout is a good fit for plain text OCR output.

Free and Premium Access

Free users can recognize text in files up to 10MB and up to three pages per run, which suits a single short scan or a couple of images. Premium subscribers unlock unlimited pages, larger files, and no wait between runs. Either way, the engine runs locally — your documents never touch a server.