What is OCR and when do you need it?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the process of scanning an image and identifying every letter inside it, so the result becomes real, selectable, searchable text. If your PDF was created from a photo, a scanner, or a fax machine, it is essentially a picture — OCR is the only way to turn it back into usable text.
Why use our OCR tool?
- Powered by Tesseract 5, the industry standard open-source OCR engine
- Supports 6 languages out of the box: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian
- Free forever, no signup, no watermark on output
- Files removed from our servers after 1 hour
How to use it
1. Open the OCR PDF tool. 2. Upload your scanned PDF (up to 100 MB). 3. Pick the document language. 4. Click Convert now — download the resulting .txt file.
Tips for higher accuracy
- Higher-DPI scans (300 dpi and above) produce dramatically better results than 72 dpi phone photos.
- Straighten the pages before scanning — even a small skew hurts accuracy.
- Choose the correct language: OCR will try to recognise letters in the selected language's alphabet only.
After the OCR
Once you have plain text, you can paste it into Word, translate it, index it, or push it into your favourite note‑taking app. Need it back as a PDF? Run the text through Text to PDF.