What This Tool Does

It reads the images inside a scanned PDF and extracts the text from them using OCR technology. The output is the text content of your document, organized by page, ready to copy or download.

Scanned PDFs are photographs of pages. They look like documents but contain no selectable text. OCR converts those images into actual readable characters.

How to Use It

• Click Choose PDF and select your scanned file.
• The tool processes each page using the Tesseract OCR engine.
• Extracted text appears page by page in the output box.
• Copy the text or use it with the PDF to Word tool for further editing.

What Affects Accuracy

Clean, high-resolution scans produce accurate results. Most typed text on a well-scanned document extracts correctly. Blurry images, skewed pages, unusual fonts, or low-contrast scans reduce accuracy. Handwriting is generally not handled well by any OCR tool.

If a page comes out garbled, the scan quality on that page is likely the cause. Re-scanning at a higher resolution usually helps.

Common Uses

• Extracting text from scanned contracts or legal documents
• Converting old printed documents into editable digital text
• Making scanned research papers searchable and copyable
• Getting text out of photographed receipts or forms
• Preparing scanned content for translation or editing

Frequently Asked Questions

How accurate is the OCR?

Good for clean, high-resolution scans of typed text. Accuracy drops with blurry images, unusual fonts, or handwriting.

What languages does it support?

English by default. The underlying Tesseract engine supports many languages but this tool is configured for English.

Does it work on regular PDFs that already have text?

Yes, but it is not necessary. Regular PDFs with selectable text already contain the text data. OCR is specifically useful for image-based scans where no text data exists yet.

How long does it take?

Processing time depends on page count and image resolution. A 5-page scan usually takes under a minute.