PDF OCR

Turn a scanned PDF into searchable, copyable text. Upload your document, pick a language, and get a page-by-page transcript plus a downloadable searchable PDF — all in your browser.

🔒 Your file never leaves your device. OCR runs locally in your browser.

Drag & Drop a scanned PDF here

Best results on documents scanned at 200–300 DPI with clear type.

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The first page in a new language downloads a language model (~3–15 MB) from Tesseract's CDN.
Higher DPI gives better accuracy on small type but takes longer per page.
Preparing…
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Extracted text by page

About the PDF OCR tool

A surprising number of PDFs are basically photographs. Scans of contracts, faxes that became PDFs decades ago, screenshots saved out of a phone, archived research papers from before everything was born digital. They look like text, but they are flat pixels. You can't search them, you can't copy a paragraph out, and you can't feed them to anything else useful. Optical character recognition (OCR) fixes that. It looks at each page image, figures out the characters, and gives you back real, selectable text.

What you get out of it

Built for documents that should be searchable but aren't

OCR is the bridge between a piece of paper and something a computer can do real work with. Use it to make a stack of scanned forms searchable so a lawyer or accountant can find a specific clause in seconds. Pull a quote out of a 1990s research paper without retyping it. Turn a phone scan of a whiteboard into notes you can edit. Convert a folder of archived contracts into something Ctrl+F can actually find things in.

Common uses

Your file stays on your computer

OCR runs entirely in your browser using a local recognition engine. The PDF you load is never uploaded, never sent to a server, and never seen by anyone but you, even when it contains contracts, medical records, or anything else sensitive. Close the tab and the file is gone from this tool entirely.

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