PDF OCR (Text Recognition)
Read text from scanned PDF pages locally in the browser via optical character recognition.
Local
About this tool
What this tool does
Recognizes text on scanned or image-based PDF pages with no embedded text layer and provides it as a downloadable text file.
How it works
Upload the PDF, choose a language, download the recognized text as a .txt file. Recognition runs entirely locally in your browser — the first use downloads a few megabytes of language data once, after which recognition works again without re-downloading.
Privacy
This operation runs directly in your browser. Your file never leaves your device.
Limitations
Recognition quality depends heavily on image quality — skewed, blurry, or very small text is recognized less reliably. For PDFs with an embedded text layer, use our text extraction tool instead.
FAQ
Text recognition is never perfectly accurate, especially with poor scan quality, unusual fonts, or handwriting. Review the result before relying on it.
No, all recognition runs locally in your browser tab. Only the language data (never your document content) is loaded from our own domain on first use.