OCR PDF
Extract text from a scanned PDF.
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About OCR PDF
A scanned contract or a phone photo saved as PDF has no text layer, so you cannot search it or copy a sentence out of it. OCR reads the pixels instead. Each page is drawn to an image, handed to the Tesseract engine with the language you chose, and the results come back in one editable box with a heading line for every page. What you get is plain text, not a searchable PDF.
Features
- Six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian
- Status line shows which page is being read
- Editable result with a separator line for each page
- Pages with nothing recognized are marked as no text detected
- Copy to clipboard or save as a .txt file
Limitations
- The output is plain text only: the tool does not produce a searchable PDF and does not keep the page layout.
- Files can be up to 30 MB, and one language is applied to every page in a run.
- The first run downloads the OCR engine and language data, and large or dense pages take longer to read.
- Saving the .txt file needs a free account; copying the text does not.
How it works
- Drop a scanned PDF onto the upload area; the page count appears once it loads.
- Pick the language of the text from the Language list.
- Select Run OCR and follow the status line, which shows the page being read.
- Correct any misread words directly in the result box.
- Copy the text, or download it as a .txt file named after your PDF.
Frequently asked questions
- Not directly. It returns the recognized text rather than a new PDF with a hidden text layer, so you copy that text into a document or notes app to search it. The page images in your original file are never modified.
- English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. Choose the one that matches the document before you run it, because the language data is loaded for that single choice and applied to every page.
- Recognition returned nothing for that page, which can happen with blank sheets, pure photographs or very low-resolution scans. The page still gets its own heading, so the page numbers in the output stay aligned with the PDF.
- No page image or file is sent to a server. The tool does fetch the OCR engine and language data from a public CDN, but the PDF itself is rendered and read inside your browser tab.