OCR PDF — Extract Text from Scanned Documents

What Is OCR?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that reads text from images. When you scan a paper document, you get an image — a photo of text, not actual text characters. OCR software analyzes the pixels of that image and identifies each character, converting the visual representation of text into actual, selectable, searchable, and editable text.

When Do You Need OCR?

• Scanned documents: physical papers scanned to PDF contain images of text, not text data
• Photos of documents: pictures taken with a phone camera of receipts, contracts, or notes
• PDFs from certain old software that rasterized text as images
• Making archives searchable: old document scans that you want to search through
• Extracting data from printed tables, forms, or reports for use in spreadsheets

How Our Browser-Based OCR Works

We use Tesseract.js — the JavaScript port of Google's Tesseract OCR engine, one of the most accurate open-source OCR systems available. Tesseract.js runs entirely in your browser, meaning your scanned documents never leave your device. It supports 100+ languages including English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and all major European languages.

OCR Accuracy Factors

OCR accuracy depends on image quality. For best results: scan at 300 DPI or higher, ensure good contrast between text and background, keep the image straight (our Rotate Image tool can help), avoid blurry or low-light captures, and use black text on white background for maximum accuracy.