PDF OCR — Extract Text from Scanned PDFs
Pull text out of a scanned or image-only PDF using optical character recognition.
How to Run OCR on a Scanned PDF
- Click the upload area and choose your scanned or image-based PDF.
- The first run downloads the OCR engine's language data (about 11MB) — this is cached, so later runs start immediately.
- Each page is rendered as an image and scanned for text, with progress shown per page.
- Copy the extracted text or download it as a .txt file once it's done.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from the regular Extract Text from PDF tool?
The regular Extract Text tool reads a PDF's embedded text layer, which only exists if the PDF was generated from a real document. This OCR tool instead renders each page as an image and runs optical character recognition on it, which works on scanned documents and image-only PDFs that have no text layer at all.
Why is this slower than the regular text extraction tool?
Each page has to be rendered as a full image and then run through an OCR recognition pass, which is far more computationally expensive than simply reading an existing text layer — expect noticeably longer processing time, especially for PDFs with many pages.
What OCR engine does this use, and what languages does it support?
It uses Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly port of the Tesseract OCR engine, loaded with the English language pack. Text in other languages or non-Latin scripts won't be recognized accurately.
Will this work well on a low-quality scan?
Accuracy depends heavily on scan quality — skewed pages, low resolution, heavy compression artifacts, or handwriting will all reduce accuracy. Clean, high-resolution scans of printed text give the best results.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No — page rendering and OCR recognition both run entirely inside your browser. Your PDF is never uploaded to a server.