OCR PDF Online — Extract Text from Scans Free
Turn scanned PDFs into selectable, copyable text with in-browser OCR. Honest note: it works best on clear scans — blurry photos and handwriting give poor results.
Drag & drop your PDF here
or click to browse — files stay on your device
Files never leave your deviceHow to OCR a scanned PDF
- Drop your scanned PDF into the box above (or click to browse) — up to 40 pages.
- Choose the document's language, then click Extract Text (OCR).
- Review the text, then copy it or download it as a .txt file.
About this free ocr pdf tool
A scanned PDF is just photos of pages — you can't search it, copy from it, or edit it. This tool renders every page to a high-resolution image and runs the open-source Tesseract recognition engine over each one, right in your browser, rebuilding the document as real text you can copy, search and reuse. A live progress bar keeps you posted page by page, and the result opens in an editable box so you can fix any misread words before copying.
The honest version: OCR reads shapes, it doesn't understand language, so garbage in means garbage out. Crisp, straight, well-lit scans of printed text come out nearly perfect; tilted phone photos, shadows, faint dot-matrix print and cursive handwriting will disappoint. If your PDF already has selectable text, skip OCR entirely and use the instant PDF to Text tool. And like every PDFPax tool, nothing is uploaded — the recognition happens on your own device.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the OCR?
On clean scans — straight pages, sharp printed text, good contrast — accuracy is typically very high. Blurry phone photos, skewed pages, faint print, decorative fonts and handwriting all reduce accuracy. Always proofread the result before using it somewhere important.
Which languages are supported?
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese (Simplified). Pick the document's language before starting for the best results; mixed-language pages work best with the dominant language selected.
My PDF already has selectable text. Do I need OCR?
No — if you can already select and copy the text, it is a real text PDF, not a scan. Use the free PDF to Text tool instead; it is instant and perfectly accurate. OCR is only for scanned/image-only PDFs.