OCR PDF

Extract text from scanned PDFs. Runs in your browser — no upload.

Drop your scanned PDF here
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OCR PDF Free — Extract Text from Scanned PDFs

Extract text from scanned PDFs directly in your browser using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). No software to install, no account required, and your files never leave your device.

How to extract text from a scanned PDF

  1. Upload your scanned PDF using the drop zone above.
  2. PDFree automatically checks whether your PDF has an existing text layer or is a scanned image.
  3. For text-layer PDFs: text is extracted instantly — no OCR engine needed.
  4. For scanned PDFs: click Install OCR Engine to load Tesseract.js (~17 MB, one-time download).
  5. Click Extract Text — your text file downloads automatically.

Text PDFs vs scanned PDFs

PDFree automatically detects which type of PDF you have uploaded. Text-layer PDFs (most PDFs created digitally) already contain machine-readable text embedded in the file — extraction is instant. Scanned PDFs (photos, fax documents, older archive scans) contain only images and require OCR to convert pixels into text.

Privacy — your files stay on your device

Scanned documents often contain sensitive content — contracts, medical records, personal letters. With PDFree, nothing is ever uploaded. The OCR engine (Tesseract.js) runs entirely inside your browser tab. There are no servers, no cloud storage, and no data collection.

Frequently asked questions

Is this OCR tool really free?

Yes, completely free. No subscription, no premium tier, no per-file charges. Tesseract.js is open-source and runs in your browser.

Does my file get uploaded?

Never. All processing — including OCR — happens inside your browser. Your PDF never leaves your device.

Why does OCR take a moment to download?

Tesseract.js is about 17 MB. To keep the page fast for everyone, it is only downloaded when you actually need it. Once downloaded, it is cached by the browser and works offline.

What format is the output?

Extracted text is saved as a plain .txt file with page separators. You can open it in any text editor, copy-paste it, or import it into Word or Google Docs.

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