OCR PDF
Recognize text in scanned documents and images, right in your browser.
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A scanned PDF is just a stack of photographs. You cannot search it, copy a paragraph from it, or paste a reference number out of it. PDFora's OCR tool reads the text inside those page images using Tesseract, the same open-source engine trusted in serious document pipelines, and hands you the recognized text as a clean .txt file you can search, edit, and reuse.
Here is what makes this OCR different: it runs entirely inside your browser. Almost every online OCR service uploads your scan to a server for processing. Ours does not. The recognition happens on your own device, so a scanned passport, a signed lease, or a page of medical results is never transmitted anywhere. For documents like these, that is not a nicety, it is the whole point.
The tool currently recognizes English, Hindi, Spanish, and French, and you pick the language before running the scan. It is free with no signup, no watermark, and no page quota. Recognition speed depends on your device, since your processor is doing the actual work, but a typical page takes only a few seconds on a modern laptop.
How to OCR a PDF online
- Open the OCR PDF tool on PDFora in a modern browser.
- Drag your scanned PDF onto the drop zone, or click to choose it from your device.
- Select the document's language: English, Hindi, Spanish, or French. The right language dramatically improves accuracy.
- Click Recognize Text and let Tesseract process each page locally in your browser.
- Watch the progress as pages complete; longer documents take a little more time.
- Download the extracted text as a .txt file and search, edit, or copy from it freely.
When to use this tool
- Pulling the text out of a 60-page scanned court judgment so you can search it for a specific clause instead of reading every page.
- Extracting quotes from photographed textbook pages for a research paper, without retyping them by hand.
- Digitizing a folder of old paper invoices so the amounts and invoice numbers become searchable records.
- Converting a scanned Hindi government circular into editable text for translation or summarization.
- Recovering the text of a document where only a printout survived, by scanning it and running OCR.
- Making meeting handouts and printed reports quotable in emails by lifting their text instead of screenshotting them.
Tips for the best results
- Feed it the cleanest scan you have. 300 DPI, good lighting, and dark text on a light background produce far better recognition than a dim phone photo.
- Straighten the scan first. Crooked pages confuse character recognition, so run a tilted document through PDFora's deskew tool before OCR.
- Match the language setting to the document. Running a Spanish letter through the English model will produce mangled output, and vice versa.
- Expect slower runs on phones and older laptops. The engine uses your device's processor, so a 100-page scan is a job for a desktop, not a five-year-old tablet.
- Proofread numbers. OCR is very good but not perfect, and digits in account numbers or totals deserve a manual glance before you rely on them.
Frequently asked questions
Does my scanned document get uploaded for processing?
No, and this is rare among online OCR tools. The Tesseract engine runs inside your browser, so every page is recognized on your own device. Nothing is sent to a server at any point, which makes it safe for IDs, contracts, and medical records.
What do I get as output?
The tool extracts the recognized text and gives it to you as a downloadable .txt file. From there you can search it, paste it into a document, or feed it into any other workflow that needs plain text.
Which languages are supported?
English, Hindi, Spanish, and French are available right now. Choose the language that matches your document before running recognition, because the engine loads a language-specific model and accuracy depends on picking the right one.
How accurate is the text recognition?
On a clean, well-lit scan of printed text, accuracy is typically very high. Quality drops with blurry photos, unusual fonts, handwriting, or heavy skew. Better input is the single biggest lever, so rescan or deskew a poor page before blaming the engine.
Why is OCR slower on my device than on my colleague's?
Because the processing is local, speed tracks your hardware. A recent laptop chews through pages in seconds each, while an older phone takes noticeably longer. The upside of that local processing is complete privacy.
Is there a limit on pages or files, and does it cost anything?
No cost, no account, no watermark, and no page quota. You can OCR an entire archive of scans if you like. The only practical constraint is time, since long documents take longer to process on your own machine.