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OCR PDF
Make an English scan’s words searchable and copyable, with each page looking as it did.
Also called: recognize text, make PDF searchable, scan to text
Drop a PDF hereStart with a PDFOpen your PDFDrop to open
It opens in this tab with the tool started. No account, nothing to install.
Without an account, your PDF never leaves your device. How?
How to OCR a PDF
Choose a PDF, or drop it on this page.
It opens in this tab, and text recognition reads every page that has no text yet.
When it’s done, then download the PDF. Its words can now be searched and copied.
Questions
Is it free to OCR a PDF?
Yes. It’s free and needs no account. It runs in your web browser, with nothing to install.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No, not without an account. Your PDF is opened and worked on in this browser tab, and never sent to our server. Text recognition runs in this tab too. The first time you use it, it downloads its program and language files from our server, and your browser keeps them. Your pages stay here.
Is there a file size limit?
Not as a guest. Your file never reaches our server, so there’s no file-size or usage quota. With a free account, each PDF kept in your library can be up to 100 MB.
Can I OCR a PDF on my phone?
Yes. It works in the web browser on a phone, a tablet or a computer.
Does OCR change how my pages look?
No. The words it reads are added invisibly under the picture, so each page looks exactly as it did, and its text can be searched and copied.
See the limits of a free account, and what stays on your device.
More tools
- Compress PDFMake the file smaller for email by scaling pictures down to print sharpness.
- Merge PDFsJoin several PDFs into one file, in the order you set, with a bookmark for each.
- Split a PDFBreak one PDF into several files: by page count, at pages you mark, by bookmark or size.
- Organize PDFDrag the pages into the order you want, and turn or delete any along the way.