OCR PDF Online

Add a searchable text layer to scans. Straight pages at 300 DPI work best.

OCR - Extract Text from PDF

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Only PDF files are supported for OCR

Optical Character Recognition: Extract searchable text from scanned PDF documents and images.
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Making scanned PDFs searchable

The short version

If you can't highlight text in a PDF, it's probably a scan, the letters are baked into an image. OCR reads that image and adds a real text layer underneath so you can search, copy, and convert to Word. Quality depends on the scan: straight pages, decent contrast, 300 DPI typed text works well; blurry phone photos of whiteboards won't.

What you get after OCR

A searchable PDF (same look, but Ctrl+F works) plus a plain .txt file with the extracted text. From there you can edit in Word, index in a DMS, or run translation.

Typical reasons to OCR:

  • Scans sitting in a folder that won't search
  • Invoices or receipts you need in Word or Excel
  • Contracts where you need to copy a clause without retyping
  • Making a document work with screen readers

What affects accuracy

300 DPI, straight pages, dark text on white paper, usually clean output with little cleanup. Handwriting, colored backgrounds, or a blurry phone photo of a whiteboard will not. This tool is for printed or typed text, not cursive notes.

You get two files: a plain .txt you can paste anywhere, and a searchable PDF that looks like the original but supports highlight and Ctrl+F.

Your file on our server

HTTPS upload, isolated session folder, deleted within an hour. Same deal as the rest of the site.

Frequently Asked Questions

OCR works best with scanned PDFs and image-based PDFs. Text-based PDFs (created from Word, etc.) already contain searchable text and don't need OCR. However, you can still use OCR on them if you want to extract the text to a separate file.

OCR accuracy depends on scan quality, text clarity, and document layout. High-quality scans with clear text typically achieve 95-99% accuracy. Lower quality scans or unusual fonts may require manual correction.

Standard OCR is for printed text. Handwriting needs different tech and usually comes out rough. Stick to typed or printed pages for reliable results.

Our OCR tool primarily supports English text, with varying levels of support for other languages depending on the Tesseract OCR engine configuration. For best results with non-English text, ensure the document is clearly scanned and uses standard fonts.