Why is OCR slow the first time?

Tesseract's language model (~5-20 MB) downloads on first run. Subsequent runs use the cached model and are much faster.

How accurate is browser OCR?

Tesseract performs well on clean, high-contrast scans. For complex layouts or handwriting, cloud OCR may be more accurate.

Does OCR work on normal text PDFs?

Yes, but it's unnecessary — use a text-extraction tool for native PDFs. OCR is for image-based scans.

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PDF OCR Scanner

Extract text from scanned PDFs using Tesseract OCR. Upload a scanned PDF, choose language, and get the recognized text for each page. Runs entirely in your browser — no server.

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Drop a scanned PDF here or click to browse

Works best on image-based PDFs

No upload · Powered by Tesseract.js · Free

Language:

Initializing Tesseract…

How to use

Drop a scanned or image-based PDF onto the upload zone.
Pick the document language for best accuracy, then click Run OCR.
Copy individual pages, or download the full text as a .txt file.

FAQ

Tesseract's language model (~5–20 MB depending on language) downloads on the first run. Subsequent runs use the cached model and are much faster.

Very good on clean, high-contrast scans. For complex layouts, handwriting or low-quality scans, cloud OCR (Google Vision, AWS Textract) may do better.

Yes, but it's overkill — use a text-extraction tool for native PDFs. OCR is intended for image-only scans.