OCR PDF
Turn a scanned PDF into one you can search, select and copy text from. The pages look exactly the same; the words become real text. It runs in your browser — the file is never uploaded.
Free · No sign-up · Files stay on your device
How to use it
- Step 1
Add your PDF
Drag it onto the page, paste it, or choose it from your device. Nothing is uploaded.
- Step 2
Adjust the settings
Pick the options you need and check the preview.
- Step 3
Download the result
Save it, or continue straight into another tool.
More about this tool
OCR — optical character recognition — reads the words in a scanned page. This tool reads each page of your PDF in your browser and adds the words it finds as an invisible text layer over the original image, the way scanners with a searchable-PDF option do. The page looks exactly the same, but you can now search it, select and copy its text, and use it in PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, the AI Summarizer and Redact.
When to use it
When a PDF is a scan or a photo of paper: a signed contract, an old report, a form someone scanned, a receipt. If you cannot highlight a word in the PDF with your mouse, it has no text, and this is the tool that gives it some.
What it will not do
Recognition is very good on clean, straight, printed text and gets worse with blur, shadows, skewed or sideways pages, small print and handwriting — handwriting is not read reliably at all. Words can come out wrong, so check anything important, such as names and amounts. Tables are read as text, not as cells, and the page image is left as it was, so the file does not get smaller.
Common questions
How do I know if my PDF needs OCR?
Try to highlight a word in it with your mouse, or search it with Ctrl+F. If nothing highlights and nothing is found, the pages are pictures of text, and OCR is what turns them into text you can search and copy.
Will the PDF look different afterwards?
No. The recognised words are added as an invisible layer over each page, lined up with the words in the image. The scan itself is not changed, re-compressed or cleaned up.
Can it read handwriting?
Not reliably. It is made for printed text. Neat block capitals are sometimes read, but handwriting in general comes out wrong or not at all.
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