OCR a scanned PDF
Recognize text in a scanned PDF using on-device OCR — no upload.
Drag & drop your file here
or click to choose — your file is processed locally and never uploaded
How to OCR a PDF
- 1
Open your scanned PDF
Drop in the file. Its pages are read locally and never uploaded.
- 2
Run recognition
Each page is rendered and read by the Tesseract OCR engine in your browser.
- 3
Copy or download the text
Get the recognized text to copy, or download as .txt or .docx.
On-device OCR for scanned documents
When a PDF is just images of text — a scan, a photo, a fax — there's no text layer to copy. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the characters from the image. pdfnoupload runs Tesseract, a respected open-source OCR engine, entirely in your browser via WebAssembly. Your scanned contracts and records are recognized locally and never uploaded, which is exactly what you want for sensitive paperwork.
Know what to expect
OCR works best on clean, straight scans of printed text at a decent resolution. Handwriting, low-quality or skewed scans, tables and multi-column layouts can produce errors or jumbled order — this is true of all OCR, not just ours. The engine downloads once and then works offline. Recognition runs in a Web Worker with a progress bar, since OCR takes time, especially on large documents.
Frequently asked questions
Is my scan uploaded for OCR?+
No. OCR runs in your browser via WebAssembly. Verify zero uploads in DevTools → Network.
Why is OCR slower than other tools?+
Recognizing characters from images is computationally heavy. It runs in a worker so your page stays responsive, with a progress bar.
How accurate is it?+
Very good on clean printed text; less reliable on handwriting, poor scans, tables or multi-column pages.