How to use the PDF OCR (Scanned PDF to Text) tool
- Choose a scanned PDF (up to 50 pages per run).
- Select the language of the document.
- Click “Extract text” and watch the progress page by page.
- Copy the text or download it as a .txt file.
Why can’t I copy text from my PDF?
A PDF created by a scanner or a phone scanning app usually contains only images of the pages. It looks like a document, but to a computer it is a picture: you cannot select words, search for a name or paste a paragraph into an email. OCR recognizes the letters on each page image and turns them back into text.
If you can already select text in your PDF, it does not need OCR. In that case, simply copy the text in your PDF viewer.
How it works
Each page is rendered at high resolution in your browser and then read by the Tesseract OCR engine. The result is separated by page markers, so you can see where each page starts. Processing takes a few seconds per page, depending on your device.
Privacy
Recognition runs on your own device with an OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly. Your documents are never uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Does it create a searchable PDF?
Not yet. It extracts the text so you can copy, edit or save it as a .txt file. A searchable-PDF option is planned.
Is there a page limit?
Each run reads up to 50 pages. Split larger documents with the Split PDF tool and process them in parts.
How accurate is it?
Clean printed scans at 300 DPI are usually recognized with very few errors. Low-quality faxes and photos need more checking.
Will formatting be kept?
No. You get plain text without fonts, tables or images.