PDF OCR — Extract Text from Scanned PDF

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that turns a picture of text — a scan, a photo, or an image-based PDF — into real, selectable, editable text. A scanned page is just pixels to a computer; OCR analyses those pixels, recognises the shapes of letters and words, and reconstructs the underlying characters.

From pixels to an editable document

Most free OCR tools stop at a flat wall of text. This one goes further: it reads the layout geometry the OCR engine produces — the position and size of every word, line and block — and uses it to rebuild the document's structure. Larger, isolated lines become headings; flowing lines become paragraphs (with end-of-line hyphenation repaired); bulleted or numbered lines become lists; and rows of text separated by aligned column gaps are recovered as real, editable tables. The result is a document you can export to Word, HTML or Markdown with far less cleanup — or as a searchable PDF that keeps the original page exactly as it looks while adding a selectable, copyable text layer on top.

Tips for the most accurate results

• Use a clean scan of at least 300 DPI; low-resolution or blurry pages reduce accuracy.
• Make sure the page is straight — skewed scans confuse line detection.
• Pick the correct language (English, Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi and more) so the engine uses the right character model.
• High contrast helps — dark text on a light background recognises best.
• Use the editable result to fix the highlighted low-confidence words before exporting.

Privacy by design

The entire process — rendering, recognition and reconstruction — runs inside your browser with WebAssembly. Your document is never uploadedto any server, and it is discarded the moment you close the tab, which makes it safe for contracts, statements and other sensitive scans. Working with a photo instead of a PDF? Use Image to Text. Need to shrink the file first? Try Compress PDF.