OCR PDF — Turn Scanned Documents Into Editable Text
Drop in a scanned PDF and this tool reads the text straight out of the page images using in-browser OCR. Copy the recognized text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file. Because the recognition engine and the English language model run entirely on your device, your document is never uploaded anywhere.
Frequently Asked Questions About Running OCR on a PDF
How does OCR PDF work?
Each page of the PDF is rendered to an image with pdf.js, then passed through the Tesseract OCR engine (tesseract.js) running locally in your browser. The recognized words are joined page by page into clean, copyable text.
What is a scanned PDF?
A scanned PDF is made of page images rather than text. Because there is no text layer, copy and search do not work. OCR reads the words out of those images so the content becomes editable text.
Why is the text not perfect?
OCR accuracy depends on the quality of the original scan. Blurry pages, low resolution, decorative fonts, and watermarks reduce accuracy. Clear, straight, high-contrast scans give the best results.
What output formats are available?
The recognized text is shown in a preview and can be copied to your clipboard or downloaded as a .txt file. You can then paste it into a document editor or feed it to the PDF to Markdown tool for further formatting.