OCR PDF

Extract text from scanned or image-based PDFs using on-device OCR - no file ever leaves your browser.

About this tool

Pulls readable text out of scanned PDFs and image-based pages using on-device OCR (optical character recognition) — the same job most free OCR tools do by uploading your file to a server, done here entirely in your browser instead.

How to use it

1. Upload a PDF — pages with a real text layer are detected automatically.
2. Click Extract Text. Pages that already have text are read instantly; scanned pages run through the OCR engine, which takes longer.
3. Copy the result or download it as a .txt file, with each page clearly marked.

FAQ

Why does this take much longer than the other PDF tools?

Only for scanned pages - recognizing text in an image is far more computationally expensive than reading a PDF's existing text layer, and it runs entirely on your device rather than a server, so speed depends on your machine.

Does this work on a PDF that already has selectable text?

Yes, and it's fast for those pages - the tool checks each page for a real text layer first and only falls back to OCR on pages that don't have one (i.e. actual scans).

What languages are supported?

English only for now. Support for additional languages may be added later.

Does the scanned file ever get uploaded anywhere?

No - the OCR engine (Tesseract.js, WebAssembly) runs entirely in your browser tab. The first use downloads the engine itself from a CDN, but your PDF and its content are never sent anywhere.