PDF OCR — Extract Text from Scanned PDFs
Automatically extract text from scanned PDFs, image-based documents, and photos of pages using Tesseract OCR. Copy, search, or download the extracted text. Free, no account needed.
How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF
- 1Upload your PDF
Click "Choose File" or drag and drop a scanned or image-based PDF.
- 2Select language (optional)
Choose the document language for better OCR accuracy. Default is English.
- 3Run OCR
Click the Extract Text button. The OCR engine processes each page automatically.
- 4Copy or download
Copy the extracted text to your clipboard or download it as a .txt file.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OCR?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that reads text from images and scanned documents. Our tool uses Tesseract, a leading open-source OCR engine, to extract text character by character.
Will it work on my scanned PDF?
Yes — if your PDF is a scanned document or image-only file, the OCR engine rasterizes each page and reads it. For PDFs with embedded selectable text, we extract it directly without OCR for instant results.
How accurate is the OCR?
Accuracy depends on scan quality. Clean, high-contrast scans typically achieve 85–95% accuracy. Low-resolution or handwritten documents may be lower. The confidence score shown per page indicates expected accuracy.
Which languages are supported?
English is the default. Select other languages from the dropdown before running OCR. The engine supports 40+ languages including French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and more.
Is there a page limit?
Up to 10 pages per upload are processed via OCR. Text-based PDFs have no page limit and are extracted instantly.
Is my document kept private?
Your PDF is processed in memory and never stored. Files are discarded immediately after the response is sent.