Free online PDF tool
Read a scanned PDF with OCR
A scanned PDF is a picture of a document. There is no text inside it, which is why searching finds nothing and copying is impossible. OCR looks at the image and works out what the letters say.
Unusually, this runs entirely on your own machine — the recognition engine is downloaded into your browser and does the work locally. Scanned documents are often the most sensitive ones a person owns, and this way they never leave your computer. The output is a plain text file of everything that was recognised.
Open OCR PDFRuns in your browser — your files are never uploaded.
How to OCR PDF
- Select the scanned PDF.
- Choose the language — English, Arabic, or both — and a quality level.
- Press "Run OCR". Recognition runs page by page, then downloads the extracted text.
Frequently asked questions
What do I get back?
A plain text file containing the recognised text, separated by page. It is not a searchable PDF, so the layout is not preserved.
Which languages are supported?
English, Arabic, or both together. Choosing both is slower but handles mixed-language documents.
Why is it slow?
Character recognition is genuinely heavy computation, and it is running on your device rather than a server. Higher quality settings take longer but read difficult scans more accurately.
How do I get the best accuracy?
Start from a clean, straight, high-resolution scan and pick the high detail setting. Skewed or low-resolution scans are much harder to read correctly.