OCR PDF
Recognise text in scanned PDFs and images in 10+ languages.
Free, no uploads, no sign-up. Runs 100% in your browser.
How OCR PDF works
OCR PDF renders each page with PDF.js and runs Tesseract (compiled to WebAssembly) on it in a background worker. The recognized text can be copied, downloaded, or embedded as an invisible layer to make the PDF searchable.
Input: PDF.
How to use OCR PDF
- Drop your PDF onto the OCR PDF area, or click to choose it.
- Wait a moment while page thumbnails render locally.
- Choose the pages and options you need. Previews update as you go.
- Press the main action button and download the finished PDF.
Tips
- Choose the document’s language for much better accuracy.
- Higher render scale improves accuracy for small print at the cost of speed.
- Straight, high-contrast scans give the best results.
OCR PDF FAQ
- Why is the first run slow?
- The Tesseract engine and the language data are downloaded once, then cached. Later runs start immediately.
- Are my files uploaded?
- No. This tool runs entirely in your browser tab. Files are read from your disk into memory and the result is generated locally.
- Is it free? Are there limits or watermarks?
- Free and open source (MIT). There are no file-size caps, daily quotas, accounts or watermarks.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes, once the page (and any engine it needs) has loaded, it keeps working without a connection thanks to the service worker cache.
Related tools
- PDF to Text: Extract text from every page, with layout-aware ordering.
- Compress PDF: Shrink PDF size with smart image downsampling and stream compression.
- Image to PDF: Combine JPG, PNG and WEBP into one PDF with page-size controls.
- Merge PDF: Combine multiple PDFs into one ordered document with drag-and-drop sorting.