OCR - Text Recognition

Free Online OCR — PDF & Image Text Recognition

Extract text from scanned PDFs and images using OCR. Supports 8 languages. Free, private, processed in your browser with Tesseract.js.

Upload scanned PDFs or image-based documents and the tool applies optical character recognition to detect and extract text from the visual content. Tesseract.js technology analyzes each page, identifies text regions, recognizes individual characters, and converts the image into searchable, copyable text. You can select from eight supported languages to improve recognition accuracy for non-English documents. All OCR processing runs entirely in your browser using client-side machine learning models, ensuring scanned contracts, receipts, and personal documents never upload to external servers.

Accountants extract text from scanned invoice images to copy vendor information and amounts into bookkeeping software without manual retyping. Researchers convert scanned pages from old library books into searchable text for quoting in academic papers. Legal assistants extract text from court filing image PDFs to search for specific case references and dates. Students convert photographed lecture notes into typed text for organizing digital study guides. Genealogists extract names and dates from scanned historical document images for family tree databases.

OCR accuracy improves significantly with high-contrast scans—ensure original documents are clearly legible before scanning for best text recognition results. Select the correct language setting to match your document's content, as character recognition algorithms are trained on specific language patterns. Clean scans with minimal skew and distortion work better than photos taken at angles or with shadows. Always proofread OCR output carefully, especially for numbers, dates, and proper nouns where recognition errors are common. For multi-page documents, process a single test page first to verify language settings and quality before committing to processing the entire file.

All processing happens directly in your browser. Your files never leave your device — no server uploads, no cloud storage, no data retention. The tool works offline once loaded, requires no registration, and is completely free with no usage limits.