OCR PDF: free online tool
OCR PDF recognizes the text in scanned or photographed pages. In your browser it adds an invisible, searchable text layer to the original PDF and gives you the plain text; Advanced AI mode reads complex layouts and tables on our GPU server and makes them editable.
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How to use OCR PDF
- Open OCR PDF and choose a scanned PDF or an image.
- Pick the languages used in the document (for example Turkish + English).
- Run OCR and download the searchable PDF or the text.
What you can do
- English, Turkish, Arabic, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese
- Searchable PDF keeps the original pages untouched
- Unlimited and private in your browser
Two ways to run OCR PDF
In your browser
Tesseract OCR on your device: searchable PDF and plain text, unlimited, no account.
Advanced AI
Reads complex layouts, tables and difficult scans with the Unlimited-OCR vision model on our private GPU server.
Privacy and where your file is processed
Browser mode recognizes the text on your device with Tesseract (WebAssembly). The OCR engine and language files are downloaded once from a public CDN; your document is never uploaded. Advanced AI mode: needs a free account, runs on our own private GPU server (not a cloud AI provider), is never used for training or shared with third parties, and the upload and result are deleted automatically after processing.
Free usage limits
Free to use. In your browser: no account, no file-size limit and no usage limit. Advanced AI mode (our private GPU server): free account with 150 credits a month (1 credit per page for OCR and PDF to Word), files up to 50 MB and 100 pages. There is no paid tier.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the OCR?
Clean, high-resolution scans give the best results. Multi-column layouts, tables and handwriting are harder, so proofread the output or use Advanced AI mode.
Do I need an account for OCR?
No. Browser OCR is free and unlimited without an account. Only Advanced AI mode needs a free account, which gets 150 credits a month.
Which scripts end up in the searchable PDF?
Latin, Cyrillic and Greek text is added to the hidden PDF text layer. Arabic, Chinese and Japanese text is recognized and available as plain text and in the editor.