Extract Text from Scanned PDF — Free Browser-Based OCR
A scanned PDF is essentially a photograph of paper — you can see the text, but you cannot select, search or copy it. To make it usable you need OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Most online OCR tools demand an upload and an account. Here is how to do OCR for free, entirely in your browser.
What OCR Actually Does
OCR scans each page image, identifies letter shapes and converts them to real Unicode text. The original layout is preserved so the result still looks like the scan, but underneath there is now searchable text. A 10-page scan typically processes in 10–30 seconds depending on your CPU.
Why Browser OCR Beats Cloud OCR
Cloud OCR services (including the free ones) upload your scanned document to their servers. If your scan contains an ID card, a tax form or a contract, you have just shared it with a third party. Browser-based OCR runs the recognition engine (Tesseract.js compiled to WebAssembly) entirely on your device — the file never leaves your browser.
How to OCR a Scanned PDF in Your Browser
Open the OCR tool, drop your scanned PDF, choose the document language (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese — and 90+ more), then click Process. The output is a searchable PDF you can download. Open it in any PDF viewer and use Ctrl+F to search the text.
Quick tip: OCR accuracy depends on scan quality. Rescan at 300 DPI if your text comes out garbled. Rotate skewed pages first using the Rotate tool — even 5° of skew degrades recognition.
Run OCR on Your Scanned PDF
Free, no upload, supports 100+ languages including Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
Open OCR Tool →