Text
PDF OCR
Turn scanned PDFs into real, selectable text using AI character recognition in your browser — copy, download and search the result.
Turn scanned PDFs into real, selectable text using optical character recognition that runs in your browser. Pick the language of your scan — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish or Turkish are available — run the recognition, then copy or download the extracted text for searching, editing or repurposing.
The recognition engine and language data stream from a public CDN into your browser; your document itself never leaves your device. Large documents can take a while.
How to use PDF OCR
- Upload the scanned PDF you want recognized.
- Select the language the document is written in.
- Run OCR; each page image is analyzed and the printed characters are recognized locally.
- Copy the extracted text or download it as a file once recognition finishes.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the recognition?
Clean, printed scans at decent resolution are recognized very accurately; blurry photos, unusual fonts, heavy skew and handwriting reduce accuracy, as with any OCR engine. Re-scanning at higher quality or rotating skewed pages first usually improves results noticeably.
Do I need an internet connection?
The document itself is never uploaded, but the recognition engine and its language data are fetched from a public CDN the first time you use the tool and cached by your browser afterwards. Only engine code is downloaded — your pages stay on your device throughout.
Does it create a searchable PDF?
It outputs the recognized text, ready to copy into a document or download as a text file. Rebuilding that text as a searchable, invisible-layer PDF is a separate step — for reading content out of a scan, the text output is usually what you need.
More free tools
More related tools for pdf ocr.