OCR PDF – Extract Text from Scanned PDFs – Free
Use optical character recognition to extract text from scanned PDFs. Supports 16+ languages – no sign-up, no watermark.
- Is it free to OCR a PDF?
- Yes, completely free. No sign-up, no watermark, no file size limit.
- What is OCR?
- OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that recognises text in images. When a PDF is a scanned image rather than a digital document with embedded text, OCR reads the image and converts it to selectable, copyable text.
- Which languages are supported?
- The tool supports 16 languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Polish, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, and Arabic.
- How accurate is the OCR?
- Accuracy depends on scan quality and resolution. Clean, high-resolution scans (300 DPI or higher) give excellent results. Blurry, skewed, or very low resolution scans may produce imperfect text.
- How long does OCR take?
- Typically 10–60 seconds depending on the number of pages and your device speed. Each page is rendered at 2× scale for best accuracy before being processed.
- Are my files uploaded to a server?
- No. OCR runs entirely in your browser using Tesseract.js. Your PDF never leaves your device. Language model data (~5MB) is downloaded once from the Tesseract CDN on first use.