PDF OCR

How to use PDF OCR

1. Open PDF 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 PDF 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 pdf ocr tasks are one click away.

What people use PDF OCR for

• Turning a scanned contract into text you can search and copy from.
• Making a scanned PDF searchable so Ctrl+F finds anything in it.
• Extracting quotable passages from a scanned report or an archived paper.
• Recovering text from a PDF that was produced by a fax or a photocopier.

PDF OCR: limits and things worth knowing

• A PDF that already contains a text layer does not need OCR — try selecting text in your reader first. If selection works, use a text extraction tool instead and you will get a perfect result rather than a recognised one.
• Recognition quality tracks scan quality. 300 DPI is the practical minimum for reliable results; 150 DPI scans produce frequent errors on small type.
• Each page is rendered and recognised in turn, so a long document takes real time — this is your device doing the work rather than a server farm, which is the trade-off for the file never leaving.
• Layout is not preserved. Tables and multi-column pages come back as running text.

Is it private and secure?

Your privacy is built in. PDF 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: one download, nothing sent. Your PDF is never uploaded. Text recognition runs locally in WebAssembly, but the first use of each language downloads that language's trained data from tessdata.projectnaptha.com. Data comes in; none goes out.

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.