Turn scanned PDFs into selectable text with Tesseract — no uploads, no accounts, no watermarks.
Drop a scanned PDF and turn its pages back into text
OCR runs entirely in your browser via Tesseract WASM. On first use the English language model (~15 MB) is downloaded once from a public CDN and cached; your PDF itself is never uploaded.
Every page is rasterized at 2× zoom first, because Tesseract accuracy drops sharply on 72 dpi input — the same scan that looks fine on screen is often too coarse to read reliably. The English model (~15 MB) is fetched once on your first run and cached by the browser; from the second document onward OCR starts instantly. Only English is supported — other languages are a real roadmap item, not a hidden limitation. Pages with no recognizable text come back as an explicit [no text recognized] marker instead of an empty gap, so you always know what the engine did.
All in the browser: the PDF never uploads, and the recognition model is a one-time ~15 MB download.
Priya received a signed contract as a flat scan. Copy-paste returns nothing because there is no text layer underneath the image.
OCR scanned PDFs online free with Tesseract. Everything runs locally; nothing is uploaded.
FreeToolHub PDF OCR is a free browser-based tool — OCR scanned PDFs online free with Tesseract. No signup, no upload; everything runs locally in your browser.
OCR scanned PDFs online free with Tesseract. Page ranges, live progress, editable text output.
Tesseract accuracy drops sharply on coarse input, and the same scan that looks fine on screen is often only 72 dpi - too few pixels for reliable character shapes. Rasterizing every page at 2x zoom before recognition materially sharpens the input, which is why this tool renders first and recognizes second rather than feeding Tesseract the raw page.
The English model (~15 MB) downloads once on your first run, caches in the browser, and every later document starts instantly - all recognition happens locally, and your PDF never uploads. Pages with no recognizable text come back as explicit no-text-recognized markers instead of silent gaps, the page range lets you skip non-scan sections of hybrid documents, and the editable output means the two misread names in a faxed contract are a five-second fix.
OCR accuracy follows input quality more than model quality, and four inputs decide most outcomes. Scan at 300 DPI — 200 DPI drops accuracy measurably while 600 DPI just slows pages down without adding accuracy. Keep pages straight: a two-degree skew noticeably degrades recognition on dense text. Prefer grayscale over aggressive black-and-white thresholding, which can shred light letters. And set the page range deliberately — running OCR only on the pages you need cuts processing time proportionally, since each page is recognized independently. After extraction, proof high-stakes numbers (invoice amounts, dates, account numbers) by spot-checking them against the scan: character-level confusions like O/0 and l/1 cluster in exactly the fields that matter most. Text in the high-nineties accuracy range needs exactly this kind of targeted review rather than a full re-read.
On first use the tool downloads the ~15 MB Tesseract English model from a public CDN and caches it in your browser. Every later run starts instantly. The PDF itself is never uploaded - only the one-time model download ever leaves the page.
English only, honestly. Other languages are a roadmap item, not a hidden limitation - the tool would rather say so than silently return garbage on a German or Spanish scan.
Accuracy depends on scan quality: clean 300 dpi documents recognize reliably, while faxed or photographed pages will show errors on small text and unusual fonts. The 2x rasterization before recognition materially improves results over raw page images, and the output is editable so corrections take seconds.
Entirely on your device — the recognition model downloads to your browser via WebAssembly and processes each page locally. Your scanned documents never leave your machine, which matters for tax papers, medical records, and contracts.
The built-in model is strongest on English and Latin-script languages. Handwriting, heavy noise, and non-Latin scripts degrade accuracy — for those, expect to proofread the output rather than trust it directly, and check numbers against the scan.
What do you call a nosy pepper?
No signups, no data sold. Every tool is free to use — the free tier allows 5 downloads or saves per day, and the optional Pro plan ($7/mo, $59/yr) adds unlimited downloads, batch processing, white-label exports and an ad-free experience.
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