PDF OCR
Extract text from scanned or image-based PDFs using browser-based OCR. Supports English and Indian languages.
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OCR is designed for scanned/image PDFs with no text layer. For digital PDFs, PDF to Word will give better results.
How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF Free
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads the pixels of each page image and converts them into editable, searchable text. You need OCR when your PDF is a scanned image — a photo of a document — rather than a PDF with an embedded text layer. If you can open a PDF in Chrome, try selecting text: if your cursor shows a crosshair and you can only drag a box, the file needs OCR. If you can highlight individual words, the file already has a text layer and PDF to Word will give better results.
India produces enormous volumes of scanned PDFs. Government orders and gazette notifications are routinely published as scanned images. District courts post cause lists and judgements as scanned PDFs. Old land records (jamabandi, patta, khata) from revenue departments are almost always scanned. College marksheets and migration certificates from universities that pre-date digitisation are scan-only. Aadhaar letters sent by post, bank passbook pages photographed at branches, and old income tax acknowledgements are all common examples. This tool handles all of these — upload, select your language, and extract the text.
How to use
- Upload your scanned PDF — the tool checks whether it's image-based or already has text
- Select the document language and quality mode (Fast for clean scans, Accurate for faded/low-quality)
- Choose output format: Plain Text for copy-paste use, or Searchable PDF to keep the original layout with a selectable text layer
- Click Start OCR and wait — each page takes 3–8 seconds. Keep the tab active for best performance
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it work on Hindi and regional language documents?
Yes — select your language before starting. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, and Gujarati are all supported. Accuracy is 70–85% for Indian languages, which means 1–3 characters in every 10 may be wrong. Always verify important extracted text against the original, especially for numbers, names, and dates.
Why is OCR so slow in the browser?
OCR requires analysing every pixel on every page — a computationally intensive process. Server-based OCR tools are faster because they use dedicated GPU hardware in datacentres. Browser OCR runs on your CPU using JavaScript, which is slower but keeps your document completely private. Your PDF never leaves your device, which matters for sensitive documents like court records or financial statements.
Will it work on handwritten text?
Tesseract.js, the OCR engine this tool uses, has very limited handwriting recognition. For clearly printed or typed scanned documents it works well. For handwritten documents — forms filled in by hand, personal letters, signatures — results will be poor. There is no browser-based OCR engine that handles handwriting reliably.
Is my document uploaded to any server?
No. Everything runs in your browser using Tesseract.js and PDF.js, both of which are open-source JavaScript libraries. Your PDF is loaded into browser memory and never transmitted anywhere. You can verify this by opening your browser's Network tab during processing — you will see no file upload requests.
My document has 300 pages — will it work?
Yes, but it will take 15–40 minutes depending on your device and the chosen quality mode. We strongly recommend using Split PDF to divide the document into 50-page chunks first. Smaller batches are faster, easier to verify, and less likely to run into browser memory limits on older devices.
Related tools: Split PDF · PDF to Word · Compress PDF