Clean, straight scans of printed text come out very accurate. Accuracy falls with low resolution, skewed pages, unusual fonts and handwriting — scanning at 300 DPI makes a bigger difference than any other single factor.

No. The whole process runs in your browser, which matters because scanned documents are so often contracts, statements and ID.

OCR PDF

Turn a scanned PDF into one you can search and copy from. Optical character recognition reads the text out of the page images, and it all runs in your browser.

Drop your scanned PDF hereRecognition runs in your browser — the scan is never uploaded

Scans are often contracts, statements and ID, so this runs entirely on your device. The first run downloads the language model, which takes a moment.

Nothing is uploaded — this tool runs inside your browser, so your files never leave your device.

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Why use this tool

Runs entirely on your device — scans are never uploaded
Recognises text in a wide range of languages
Copy the extracted text or download it
Makes scans usable with the PDF to Word and Excel converters

How it works

1Upload your scanned PDF.
2Wait while the pages are read — the first run downloads the language model.
3Copy or download the recognised text.

OCR PDF — frequently asked questions

The recognition engine and its language data have to download to your browser before the first page can be read. That's a one-off cost of a few seconds to a minute; after that it's cached and later documents start immediately.

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