OCR PDF

OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in a scanned page or photo and turns them into real text. A scanned PDF is just a picture of the page, so you cannot search it, select text or copy it. After OCR, the page looks the same but every word can be found with Ctrl+F, selected and copied.

Upload your scanned PDF above, check the language (it is detected automatically), choose Searchable PDF or Plain Text, and click OCR PDF. You can also upload JPG or PNG images; they are turned into a PDF first. Download the result, free and without a watermark.

Choose Searchable PDF as the output. The tool keeps your original pages exactly as they are and adds an invisible text layer on top, so the PDF looks identical but you can search it with Ctrl+F, highlight and copy text, and screen readers can read it aloud.

Open the PDF and try to select a word or search for it with Ctrl+F. If the text highlights and the search finds it, the PDF already has a text layer and does not need OCR. If you can only select the whole page as an image, or the search finds nothing, run OCR first.

Yes. Upload a JPG or PNG, for example a photo or screenshot of a document, and choose Plain Text as the output. You get the recognised words as a .txt file you can copy anywhere. Choose Searchable PDF instead if you want to keep the image with selectable text.

Use PDF to Word: it accepts scanned PDFs and JPG or PNG images and runs OCR automatically when a page has no real text, so you get an editable Word document instead of a picture. Clean, straight scans give the most accurate result. Open PDF to Word

Yes. Choose Plain Text as the output and every page is read and saved as a .txt file with just the words, ready to paste into a document, email or spreadsheet. For several files you get a ZIP with one text file each.

On clean, well-lit scans of printed text, recognition is very accurate, but no OCR is 100% accurate. Results drop with blurry or skewed photos, very small or decorative fonts, faded copies and complex layouts, and handwriting is usually not recognised reliably. Scan at 300 DPI if you can, keep the page straight, and check names and numbers in the result.

33 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Polish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian. The language is detected automatically when you upload; for a document in one main language, choosing it yourself gives the best result.

Yes. OCR and downloads are free, with no watermark and no subscription. Without an account you can OCR one file of up to 150 pages and 80 MB; sign in free for up to 3 files at once, 300 pages and 100 MB per file.

No. The OCR runs online in your browser, on Windows 11, Mac, Chromebook, Linux, iPhone or Android, so there is nothing to download or install. Smaller jobs often run right on your device, and larger documents are processed on our server.

Yes. Open this page in your phone's browser, upload a PDF or a photo of a document and run OCR. To capture paper documents with the camera first, use Scan PDF and then OCR the result here. Open Scan PDF

Yes. The text is recognised by Tesseract 5, an open-source OCR engine that uses an LSTM neural network trained on printed text. It is not a chatbot: there are no prompts and nothing is rewritten, the tool simply reads the text that is on the page.

A searchable PDF lets you search, select and copy the text, but the page itself is still the original image. To edit the wording, convert the scan with PDF to Word, which runs OCR and gives you an editable .docx, or choose Plain Text here and paste the words into your editor. Open PDF to Word

Without an account: one file, up to 150 pages and 80 MB. With a free account: up to 3 files at once, 300 pages in total and 100 MB per file, delivered together as a ZIP. Split longer documents first.

Yes. You can import files from Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive on the upload screen and save the result back to any of them. You can also create a share link, or send the PDF straight to PDF to Word, Compress PDF or another tool without downloading it.

Yes. Files are sent over HTTPS, never shared, and removed from our servers shortly after the job finishes. Some jobs run entirely in your browser; to keep every step on your device, switch on Browser mode in the tools menu (very large files and some languages then are not supported).