Online Tool Store
PDF OCR Tool
Recognize text from scanned or image-only PDF pages using an in-browser OCR engine, page by page, with nothing ever uploaded to a server.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to a server.
Best for scanned or image-only PDFs. Recognizes printed English text — nothing is uploaded, the OCR engine runs on your device.
How the PDF OCR tool works
- Choose a scanned or image-only PDF.
- Each page is rendered to an image, then read by an in-browser OCR engine, one page at a time.
- The recognized text from every page is combined and shown below, ready to copy or download.
How it differs from text extraction
A text-based PDF stores its words as actual character data, which a normal text extractor can read directly. A scanned PDF is really just a sequence of page images with no character data at all — to "read" it, the pixels have to be analyzed and matched against known letter shapes, which is what optical character recognition (OCR) does. This tool renders each page at 2x resolution for sharper recognition, then runs Tesseract OCR's line-based recognition model on it.
FAQ
When do I need this instead of the regular PDF Text Extractor?
Our PDF Text Extractor pulls text that's already embedded in the PDF. If your PDF is a scan or a photo saved as a PDF, there's no embedded text to pull — this tool recognizes the text from the page images instead, using OCR.
Does it work on very large PDFs?
It can, but each page is rendered to an image and recognized individually, so more pages means more time — everything happens in your browser tab, with no server queue, but a 100-page scan will take noticeably longer than a 5-page one.
Which languages are supported?
This release recognizes printed English text. Handwriting and non-English text will produce unreliable results.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. Every page is rendered and recognized entirely in your browser using WebAssembly — the file is never sent to Online Tool Store or any other server, aside from a one-time download of the OCR language model on first use.
How we compare
| Feature | Online Tool Store | OnlineOCR.net | Adobe Acrobat (desktop app) |
|---|---|---|---|
| File processed on your device, never uploaded | ✓ | Uploads to server | ✓ |
| Free, no page limit | ✓ | Daily page limit | Paid subscription |
| No install required | ✓ | ✓ | Desktop app install |
For a private, free way to pull text out of a scanned PDF without installing software or hitting a page limit, the Online Tool Store PDF OCR Tool keeps everything on your device.