PDF to Text (OCR)
Extract text from a scanned or image-based PDF up to 200MB by running OCR on each rendered page.
Drag & drop a file here, or click to browse
Works best on scanned documents
How to use this tool
Upload a scanned PDF and click Extract Text. Each page is drawn as an image at 144 pixels per inch and read by the Tesseract engine, and the text of every page follows a --- Page N --- line so you can tell where each came from. Only English is recognised. The first run downloads about 7 MB of engine and language data from cdn.jsdelivr.net; your PDF is never part of that request.
Check first: does the PDF already have text?
Open the PDF and try to select a word. If it highlights, the text is already in the file, and copying it, or saving it as text from your PDF viewer, is exact. OCR would only re-read the picture of that text and could introduce errors. OCR is for scans and photographed pages, where the page is a picture and nothing can be selected.
When a scanned page comes out badly
Pages are read as they are, without the straightening and clean-up the image OCR tool offers. A page scanned at a noticeable tilt, or with small print, is better handled by rendering it with the PDF to Image converter and reading the PNG with the Image to Text tool with Enhance image first ticked. In this site's tests, straightening took a line tilted 15° from 54% to 100% accuracy.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from the regular Image OCR tool?
This one takes a whole PDF and reads every page in turn, adding a page marker before each page's text. The image tool reads one picture at a time but can straighten, enlarge and convert it to grayscale first, which helps with poor photos and tilted scans.
Can it read Hindi, Gujarati or other scripts?
No. Only the English language model is loaded, so text in Devanagari, Gujarati or any other script comes back as meaningless Latin letters rather than being skipped. English text on a page that also has other scripts is still read.
Does processing time scale with the number of pages?
Yes, roughly linearly — each page is rendered and recognized individually, so a 20-page document takes about twenty times as long as a 1-page one. The progress indicator shows which page is currently being processed so you can gauge how much longer a large document will take.
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