Free In-Browser OCR
OCR a scanned PDF online free
Extract real, usable text from a scanned or image-based PDF. Use the tool below to run OCR, then download the recognized text.
Browser-based OCR
Open a scanned or image-based PDF and recognize the text on each page. The OCR engine downloads and runs entirely in your browser, so the first run can take a moment and OCR itself is slower than the other tools here.
Your files are handled safely
✔ Processing happens in your browser
✔ Your file is never uploaded to a server
✔ Your files are not stored or saved anywhere
✔ No account or sign-up required
Why Use It
Common reasons people run OCR
Scanned documents
Pull real, usable text out of a PDF made from scanned pages or photos.
Old paperwork
Turn image-only archives into text you can search, copy, and edit.
No text layer PDFs
Recover content from PDFs where Compress, Split, and other text-based tools show no extractable text.
How It Works
Simple 3-step workflow
1. Choose your scanned PDF
Choose the scanned or image-based PDF you want to read.
2. Run OCR
Each page is rendered and scanned for text using an in-browser OCR engine.
3. Download the text
Save the recognized text as a .txt or .docx file.
Honest Limits
Real OCR, with real tradeoffs
This is genuine text recognition, not a shortcut — which means it's slower and heavier than the rest of this site's tools. It outputs the recognized text as a .txt or .docx file rather than rebuilding a searchable PDF with a positioned invisible text layer. Recognition quality depends on scan clarity, and it currently supports English text.
FAQ
OCR PDF questions
Why is OCR slower than your other tools?
OCR runs a real text-recognition engine (Tesseract) entirely in your browser. The engine itself is a multi-megabyte download on first use, and recognizing text is more computationally intensive than the file operations used by tools like Compress or Merge.
Does this produce a searchable PDF, or just text?
This tool extracts the recognized text as a .txt or .docx file. It does not embed an invisible, correctly positioned text layer back into a PDF.
What languages are supported?
This tool currently recognizes English text.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. OCR runs entirely in your browser using a WebAssembly text-recognition engine. Your PDF is never uploaded to a server, and nothing is stored.