How accurate is the recognition?

Clean 300 dpi scans of typed pages are very good; handwriting, newspaper columns, faint pencil and skewed pages all cost accuracy. Improve the source scan before re-running rather than trusting a second pass.

Why is OCR slow on my document?

Every page is rendered and analysed in your tab, which is memory- and CPU-heavy. Close other tabs, or split the document and recognise it in two runs.

Do I need an internet connection?

The recognition engine and language data are fetched once from the CDN when you first run OCR; after that the work itself is local.

Will OCR change how my pages look?

No. Searchable-PDF output keeps the page image exactly as it was and adds an invisible text layer beneath it.

OCR PDF

Recognize text in scanned PDFs — English & Hindi supported (Tesseract).

Drop scanned PDFs or photos here

or click to browse — .pdf · up to 20 files

OCR languages

EnglishHindi

OCR runs fully in your browser with Tesseract WASM — a typical page takes 5–15 seconds. The language model is fetched once from the Tesseract CDN and cached afterwards. Handwriting and rotated pages reduce accuracy; for best results supply straightened scans at 200–300 DPI.

Add a file first.

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About OCR PDF

OCR a scanned PDF with Tesseract running in your browser, which lays an invisible text layer under the page image so the document becomes selectable, searchable and copyable. English and Hindi are supported, so a mixed scan is not a problem.

Making an archive of scans searchable, or copying a single line out of a photographed page.

How to use OCR PDF in 3 steps

Drop the scanned PDF that has no text layer.
Pick the OCR languages on the page and choose searchable PDF or plain text output.
Run the recognition and download the result.

What you get with OCR PDF

Searchable PDF keeps the original page image with text laid over it
Recognition happens locally — a stack of paper becomes a file without being uploaded
Text output is available when you only want the words
Free to use, with no signup and no account
No watermark or logo added to your output
Works on desktop and mobile, no install

OCR PDF: questions

How accurate is the recognition?: Clean 300 dpi scans of typed pages are very good; handwriting, newspaper columns, faint pencil and skewed pages all cost accuracy. Improve the source scan before re-running rather than trusting a second pass.
Why is OCR slow on my document?: Every page is rendered and analysed in your tab, which is memory- and CPU-heavy. Close other tabs, or split the document and recognise it in two runs.
Do I need an internet connection?: The recognition engine and language data are fetched once from the CDN when you first run OCR; after that the work itself is local.
Will OCR change how my pages look?: No. Searchable-PDF output keeps the page image exactly as it was and adds an invisible text layer beneath it.