If you have a scanned PDF that behaves like a picture, you cannot select its words, copy a paragraph or search it with Ctrl+F. This ocr pdf online tool fixes exactly that: drop in a scanned PDF or a photo of a page and it reads the printed text into editable words you can copy, search and reuse. It works as an image to text converter too, for JPG, PNG, WebP and BMP photos of documents. Everything runs in your browser, so your file is never uploaded to a server, and there is no sign-up.
Pick the language of your document before you extract: English, Hindi, or English and Hindi together for mixed documents. The first run downloads the OCR engine and the language data, a few MB, which your browser then caches, so later runs start at once.
Key features
- Scanned PDFs and images in one tool: read a multi-page scanned PDF, page by page, or a single photo of a page, receipt, certificate or book page.
- English and Hindi: choose English, Hindi, or both together for documents that mix the two languages.
- Editable text out: copy the result straight into a document or email, or download it as a TXT file, with a word count and an average confidence score for the run.
- Private by design: your file is read on your own device and never uploaded, which makes this safe for invoices, contracts and certificates.
- Free, with no sign-up: no account, no credits and no daily limit.
How to use
- Drop your scanned PDF or image onto the tool, or choose it from your device. Files up to 25 MB are accepted.
- Pick the document language: English, Hindi, or English and Hindi together.
- Click Extract text and wait while each page is read. A longer PDF takes longer, because the reading happens on your device.
- Check the text below the tool, then copy it or download it as a TXT file.
How OCR works here
OCR, short for optical character recognition, turns the pixels of a scanned page into real text. A scanned PDF stores each page as a picture, which is why its words cannot be selected. This tool first turns each PDF page into a picture at a readable resolution, then the OCR engine looks at that picture, finds the letters and words, and returns them as plain text, page by page. The same engine reads a photo of a page directly, without the PDF step.
Because the engine runs in your browser, nothing about your document leaves your device. The trade-off is speed and size: reading happens at the pace of your own device, and PDFs are capped at the first 20 pages. For a longer PDF, split it first with our Free PDF Tools, then read each part here.
Honest limits worth knowing
Four limits are worth knowing before you start. First, this tool reads printed text only, not handwriting: handwritten notes, signatures and scribbled forms read poorly or not at all, and no honest tool should claim otherwise. Second, quality in means quality out: a flat, well lit, straight scan reads cleanly, while a blurry, dark, skewed or tiny photo gives patchy text, even when the tool reports a confidence score. Third, the output is plain text, not a searchable PDF with a hidden text layer, so keep your original PDF if you need the layout and the pictures as well. Fourth, very long or complex layouts, such as dense tables and multi-column pages, may come out with the reading order changed, so check tables and columns against the original before you reuse them.
If a page comes back empty, it usually means the scan is too blurry, too dark or too small to read. Try a clearer photo, or flatten a curved book page first with our Document Dewarper, then read it here. If your PDF already has selectable text, you do not need OCR at all: our File to Markdown Converter reads that text layer straight into clean Markdown.
Private by design
Like every Savozi tool, this one runs entirely in your browser. Your PDFs and images are read and processed on your own device and are never uploaded to our server, so there is no server copy and no upload wait. It is part of our free PDF tools collection: free, no account, and nothing to install.