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Read the text out of a scanned PDF and make it searchable, without uploading it anywhere.
Drag & drop your file here
or browse from your device
A scanned page is a photograph of text. To you it reads perfectly well, but to the computer it is a picture, which is why searching finds nothing and selecting a paragraph is impossible. OCR looks at the shapes on the page and works out which letters they are.
Your document is not sent anywhere. Most OCR services upload your file to their servers, which is worth pausing over when the document is a contract, a medical record, or an ID. Here the engine comes to your file instead.
Your scan is kept exactly as it is. On top of it, each recognised word is placed invisibly in the spot where it actually sits on the page. You see nothing new, but your reader now has real text to work with.
Search finds the word and highlights the right place. Selecting a sentence selects the right sentence. And because the original image is untouched, nothing is lost if the recognition got a word wrong.
Almost everything depends on the scan itself. A straight, well lit, reasonably sharp page of ordinary printed text is read very accurately. A crooked page, a faint photocopy, an unusual typeface, or a photograph taken at an angle all make it much harder.
The confidence score in the result is worth looking at rather than skipping past. Above eighty is a good sign. Below that, expect real mistakes, and check anything that matters. OCR is a useful tool, not a perfect one, and treating its output as certain is how errors travel quietly into documents.
It reads words out of a picture. A scanned page holds a photograph of text rather than the text itself, which is why searching and copying do not work on it. OCR looks at the shapes and works out which letters they are.
Your scan exactly as it was, with the recognised text laid invisibly on top of each word. Nothing looks different, but the text can now be selected, searched, and copied. It is the option most people want.
It depends almost entirely on your scan. Clean, straight, typed pages come through very well. Faint, crooked, or low resolution pages come through poorly. The result tells you the confidence score, and a low one is a warning worth taking seriously.
Not reliably. It is built for printed text. Neat block capitals sometimes work, ordinary handwriting rarely does.
Because reading text is genuinely hard, and the engine that does it has to come to your device. That is the cost of doing this in your browser rather than sending your document to a server. It downloads once and stays in your browser cache afterwards.
No. This is the whole reason for doing it this way. Most OCR services upload your file to their servers, which is worth thinking about when the document is a contract, a medical record, or an ID. Here the engine comes to your file rather than your file going to a server, and the engine is served from this site rather than an outside one.
Every page has to be drawn as an image and then examined letter by letter, and that work happens on your own device rather than on a powerful server. A few seconds a page is normal. The fast setting trades some accuracy for speed.
English, Urdu, and Arabic. Picking the right one matters more than any other setting, because the engine is matching shapes against what it knows about that language.
Either the scan is too faint or crooked to read, or the pages are handwritten. It is also worth checking whether your PDF already has real text in it, in which case the PDF to Text tool is faster and perfectly accurate.
Yes. It is completely free with no sign-up and no limits.
Continue working with your images and PDF files using these free browser based tools.