TL;DR: Upload a scanned PDF and download a searchable, copy-pasteable PDF — or extract the text as .txt/JSON.
OCR PDF online for free — convert scanned documents into searchable, selectable text using Tesseract OCR. Supports 100+ languages. Output as searchable PDF or plain text.
Reach for OCR PDF when you want the job done without handing your file to a data broker. Browser-native tools stay on your device; the rest use a single-request isolated container that deletes the file right after responding. MIT-licensed and ad-free.
OCR PDF online for free — convert scanned documents into searchable, selectable text using Tesseract OCR. Supports 100+ languages. Output as searchable PDF or plain text. Use it when you need a quick, private, no-account way to handle a pdf in the browser, or when you want an auditable open-source alternative to iLovePDF, Smallpdf, Adobe Acrobat, PDF24, and Sejda. The page at /tool/ocr-pdf is designed for one clear job: upload or provide the input, choose only the options that matter, and download the result without creating an account or passing through a sales funnel.
PDF operations that need server-side libraries run inside the PrivaTools container and return a fresh download; browser-only PDF helpers stay on-device. Temporary input and output files are not used for analytics, model training, advertising profiles, or product telemetry. The public demo uses anonymous page-view analytics only; file bytes, extracted text, filenames, passwords, signatures, and generated results are outside that analytics path. If your organization needs stricter controls, you can self-host all 214 PrivaTools utilities and keep processing on your own infrastructure.
Before running OCR PDF, confirm that the source file opens correctly and that you have permission to process it. Keep an untouched original, run one operation at a time when quality matters, and use Pipeline when you want repeatable multi-step output. For sensitive material, review the downloaded result before sharing it. For large files, give the browser time to finish the download and avoid refreshing the page mid-run. If a password, damaged upload, unsupported codec, or malformed document blocks processing, PrivaTools returns a plain-language error so you can pick the next recovery step instead of guessing.
OCR PDF is intentionally narrow: it does one pdf task and hands the result back as a normal download. That makes the output easy to inspect, rename, archive, attach to email, or feed into another tool. If you need a repeatable workflow, save the page, bookmark a Pipeline recipe, or self-host the API so the same steps can run from internal scripts. The interface avoids accounts and cloud folders on purpose: the safest default for private files is to process only the current request, return the result, and leave long-term storage under your control.
OCR PDF runs in any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS — there is nothing to install, no extension to add, and no desktop app to keep updated. Because the interface is a single page, you can bookmark it, send the link to a colleague, or open it on a phone and get the same result you would on a laptop. There are no watermarks stamped onto your output, no sign-in wall before the download, and no paid tier that unlocks the “real” version later — the OCR PDF you see is the complete tool. For teams that would rather keep everything in-house, the same endpoint ships in the MIT-licensed, self-hostable build, so you can run it behind your own firewall with identical behaviour and no outbound calls. That combination — instant in the browser for individuals, fully self-hostable for organizations — is what keeps a private file genuinely private from upload to download.
PrivaTools ships Tesseract's full language pack: 100+ languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Hebrew, Thai, and Vietnamese. Pick the language explicitly for best accuracy; auto-detect works but adds a few seconds.
No — the visual page stays pixel-identical to the input. OCR adds an invisible text layer behind the scan so the PDF becomes searchable and copy-pasteable, but the human-readable appearance is unchanged.
Clean 300 DPI scans typically reach 95–99% accuracy on Latin scripts. Lower resolutions or skewed pages drop to 85–95%. For best results, run Deskew PDF before OCR if pages are tilted, and crank up the scanner DPI if you control the scan.
Yes. The default output is a searchable PDF, but you can also download just the extracted text as .txt (per page or combined) or as structured JSON with per-page text and bounding boxes.
Yes. The PDF enters an isolated Docker container, OCR runs in temporary per-request storage, the result is returned, and both the input and output are unlinked immediately. The text is never logged, never indexed, never sent to any third-party API. The whole pipeline is open source for verification.
Yes — the OCR doesn't need a keyboard, only that the language pack is installed (which it is for 100+ languages). After OCR, you can copy the text to a translator like DeepL or Google Translate.
See how PrivaTools compares to iLovePDF, Smallpdf, Adobe Acrobat, and other free PDF tools.