Turn scanned PDFs into text. Run OCR, extract text from a scanned PDF, convert it to a searchable PDF and pull simple tables into Excel, all in one free online tool. Everything runs in your browser, so your documents stay private.
🔒 Private by design: your PDF is processed inside your browser and is never uploaded. Only the OCR engine and the language data are downloaded once from a public CDN.
Choose what you want to do. The tool above switches instantly, and your PDF stays loaded. Text you have already recognized is reused, so switching tools is quick.
A scanned PDF is really a stack of pictures. You can look at it, but you cannot search it, select a sentence or copy a figure into a spreadsheet. Optical character recognition, or OCR, reads the letters in those pictures and turns them back into real text.
This free tool runs OCR directly in your browser. Drop in a scanned PDF, choose the language, and get recognized text, a searchable PDF or a table export. There is no sign-up, no watermark and no upload, so private documents stay on your device.
Run text recognition on every page or on a page range you choose. You see the recognized text page by page, together with a confidence score that tells you how sure the engine is. Low scores point you to pages that deserve a closer look, such as faint scans or crooked pages.
Get all the text in one editable box. Add page markers, join broken lines into proper paragraphs, then copy the text or download it as a TXT file or a Word-compatible DOC file. Languages with non-Latin scripts, including Bengali, Hindi, Arabic and Russian, are supported.
Keep your original pages exactly as they look and add an invisible text layer on top. The result opens in any PDF reader, and you can search it with Ctrl+F, select words and copy passages. Pages that already contain real text can be skipped automatically.
Find simple tables on text-based or scanned pages and download them as an Excel workbook or a CSV file. Each table is shown in a preview first. This feature is a best-effort helper and works best for clean tables with clear gaps between columns.
Many online OCR services upload your pages to a server and often limit pages, add watermarks or ask you to pay. This tool processes everything on your own device with an open source OCR engine, so contracts, ID cards, bank statements and medical records are never sent anywhere. It also supports many languages, including Bengali.
Yes. It is 100% free, with no registration, no watermark and no limit on the number of files.
No. Your PDF is read and recognized inside your browser. Only the OCR engine and the language data are downloaded from a public CDN, and your document is never sent anywhere.
You can choose English, Bengali, English plus Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese and Korean.
The browser has to download the OCR engine and the language data once. Languages such as Bengali, Chinese and Japanese have larger data files. After that, the files are cached and the next runs start much faster.
Accuracy depends on the scan. Clean, straight pages at 200 to 300 DPI in the correct language usually give very good results. Handwriting, low-resolution photos and decorative fonts give weaker results, which the confidence score helps you spot.
A searchable PDF keeps the original scanned pages and adds an invisible layer of text on top. You can then search for words, select text and copy it, while the page still looks exactly like the scan.
The invisible text layer uses a standard PDF font, which only supports Latin characters. For Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Russian and other scripts, use the Scanned PDF to Text tab to get the recognized text.
It works best for clean tables with clear gaps between columns, on text PDFs or good scans. Merged cells, borderless layouts and photographed pages can be missed or split wrongly, so always check the preview.
Yes. In the Searchable PDF tab, pages with existing text are skipped by default, and the Extract Tables tab uses the existing text layer automatically. You can still force OCR if the text layer is wrong.
It works in modern mobile browsers, but OCR is faster on a computer, especially for long documents. Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened, so remove the password with the original software first.
Merge, split, compress, edit and secure your PDF files with our other free tools.