NextTool

PDF OCR

How to use

Reads text out of scanned or image-based PDFs by recognizing the letters in the picture. It adds a searchable, selectable text layer on top of the page, so you can copy text or search the document. Select your scanned PDF, choose the language, and click Recognize text. The first run downloads a language pack for that language.

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Select a scanned PDF

Recognizes text in scans and adds a searchable text layer

When to use this
  • Digitizing archived paper contracts or old book scans into searchable text
  • Quoting text from a photographed receipt or printed article without retyping it
  • Making a scanned research paper searchable for keyword lookup
  • Recovering text from a scan when the original digital file no longer exists

Free and private. Everything runs on your own device, with no account and no uploads.

PDF OCR extracts text from scanned documents and image-based PDFs, such as printed contracts, old book scans, or photographed receipts, using optical character recognition that runs right in your browser. This makes previously unsearchable scans copyable and searchable without sending them to a cloud OCR API.

Accuracy depends heavily on scan quality and font clarity; clean, high-resolution scans typically yield very good results while blurry or handwritten text is less reliable.

No, recognition runs locally in your browser using an in-browser OCR engine, so scanned documents are not uploaded anywhere.

OCR is optimized for printed text; handwritten content is usually recognized poorly or not at all.

Yes, you can select from multiple supported languages to improve recognition accuracy for non-English documents.

It can, but results improve significantly with better lighting, higher resolution, and a straight, non-blurry scan.

Processing time scales with the number of pages and your device speed, so larger scanned documents take proportionally longer.

How it works
  1. 1

    Upload your scanned PDF

    Select the image-based or scanned PDF you want to run OCR on.

  2. 2

    Choose the recognition language

    Pick the language that matches the text in your document for best accuracy.

  3. 3

    Run OCR processing

    Let the tool analyze the pages and recognize the text characters.

  4. 4

    Review and export

    Check the recognized text for errors, then copy it or download it as a text file.

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Read about this
Getting a table out of a PDF without retyping it4 minOCR on scanned PDFs: what it can read, what it cannot, and why DPI matters3 min
Pro tips
  • ·Select the correct recognition language before running OCR, since mismatched language settings hurt accuracy significantly.
  • ·Higher-resolution, well-lit, and straight scans produce far better results than blurry or skewed ones.
  • ·Do not expect good results on handwriting; OCR is tuned for printed text.