Extract Text (OCR)

How to use Extract Text (OCR)

1. Open Extract Text (OCR) — no sign-up or software download is required.
2. Drag and drop your file(s) into the tool, or click to browse and select them from your device.
3. Choose any options you need, such as order, quality, page range or output format.
4. Click the action button and let the tool process everything locally in your browser.
5. Download the finished file. Your originals are never changed or uploaded.

Why use Extract Text (OCR)?

• 100% free with no limits, no sign-up and no watermarks.
• Private by design — your files are processed in your browser and never uploaded to a server.
• Fast and lightweight, with instant results even on a phone or a slow connection.
• Works everywhere — any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS.
• Part of a full pdf tools suite, so related extract text tasks are one click away.

What people use Extract Text (OCR) for

• Getting the wording out of a PDF or image for quoting, translating or analysis.
• Recovering text from a document you cannot copy from directly.
• Preparing document content for a word count or a search.

Extract Text (OCR): limits and things worth knowing

• If the PDF already has a text layer, the text is extracted exactly — no recognition involved and no errors. OCR is used only as a fallback when there is nothing to extract.
• Try selecting text in your reader first. If selection works, extraction will be perfect; if it does not, you are relying on OCR and should expect some errors.
• Layout is not preserved. Columns, tables and headers come back as running text in the file's internal order, which is not always the visual reading order.

Is it private and secure?

Your privacy is built in. Extract Text (OCR) does all processing on your own device using client-side code, so your files are never transmitted, stored or seen by anyone — including us.

Network activity: none. Nothing is sent and nothing is fetched. This tool makes no network request at all once the page has loaded — which is why it keeps working if your connection drops.

You do not have to take that on trust — our privacy proof page publishes the Content-Security-Policy that enforces it, lists every third party it permits, and shows how to verify the whole claim yourself.

We also measured the competition. Our PDF upload audit recorded how many bytes each of 20 online PDF tools actually transmits: 12 of the 13 measurable services uploaded the whole test file, and Filevane transmitted 0.00 MB.

Learn more

OCR: Turn Scanned PDFs and Images into Editable Text — What OCR is, when to use it, and how to extract text from scans, photos and image-only PDFs — privately, in your browser.