PDF OCR Text Extractor

Extract text from scanned PDFs and images using OCR. Supports multiple languages.

# PDF OCR Text Extractor — Extract Text from Scanned PDFs Online

Use AI-powered Optical Character Recognition to extract editable text from scanned PDF documents and images. Supports English, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, and more. Fully client-side.

What is PDF OCR and Why Do You Need It?

Scanned PDFs are image-based — they look like text documents but contain no machine-readable text. You cannot search, copy, or edit the text because it exists only as pixels in an image. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) analyzes these pixel patterns and converts them to actual text characters.

Our PDF OCR tool uses Tesseract.js — a WebAssembly port of Google’'s industry-leading Tesseract OCR engine — running entirely in your browser. No scan data is transmitted to any server.

How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF

  1. Upload your scanned PDF or image file (PNG, JPG, TIFF, WebP).
  2. Select the document language from the dropdown (English, Arabic, French, German, Spanish).
  3. Click “Extract Text” — a progress bar shows recognition progress.
  4. Review the extracted text in the output textarea.
  5. Copy the text to clipboard with one click.

How Tesseract.js OCR Works

The OCR pipeline involves multiple steps:

  1. PDF Rendering: Each PDF page is rendered to an HTML5 canvas using pdfjs-dist at 2× scale (approximately 150 DPI) to ensure sufficient resolution for accurate recognition.
  2. Preprocessing: Tesseract internally applies adaptive thresholding to binarize the image (convert to black/white), deskewing to correct slight rotational misalignments, and line detection to identify text baselines.
  3. Character Recognition: The neural network model (LSTM-based, trained on millions of document samples) analyzes image regions and produces a probability distribution over possible characters.
  4. Word Assembly: Characters are assembled into words using a language model and dictionary matching to resolve ambiguities.
  5. Output: Text is assembled in reading order and returned with a confidence score (0–100%).

Supported Languages & Scripts

Tesseract.js supports over 100 languages. This tool includes:

  • English (eng) — Latin script, optimized for printed text
  • Arabic (ara) — RTL text, includes Arabic numerals
  • French (fra) — Latin with diacritics (é, à, ù, etc.)
  • German (deu) — Latin with umlauts (ä, ö, ü, ß)
  • Spanish (spa) — Latin with ñ, accents
  • Chinese Simplified (chi_sim) — Ideographic characters

Real-World Use Cases

Legal Discovery — Convert hundreds of scanned legal documents into searchable, copyable text for review.

Academic Research — Extract text from scanned historical documents, academic papers, or book chapters.

Data Entry Automation — Convert paper forms, invoices, and receipts to digital text for database entry.

Accessibility — Make scanned PDFs accessible to screen readers by extracting and re-publishing the text.

Archive Digitization — Convert institutional paper archives to searchable digital text.

Medical Records — Extract text from scanned medical documents for electronic health record systems.

Tips for Better OCR Accuracy

Factor Recommendation
Scan Resolution 300 DPI minimum; 600 DPI for best results
Contrast High contrast between text and background
Orientation Pages should be straight (use PDF Organize to fix skewed scans)
Font Size Text below 8pt may not be recognized accurately
Language Always select the correct language for better accuracy

Frequently Asked Questions

What accuracy can I expect?

On clean, well-scanned documents at 300 DPI, Tesseract typically achieves 97–99% character accuracy. For poor-quality scans with noise, stains, or unusual fonts, accuracy may drop to 85–95%.

Can the tool handle handwriting?

Tesseract is optimized for printed text. Handwriting recognition accuracy is significantly lower (50–70%) and varies with handwriting clarity.

Does Arabic text appear in the correct direction?

Yes. The Arabic language model outputs right-to-left text correctly. However, the textarea display direction should be set to RTL in a text editor for proper viewing.

Can I use this for a passport or ID scan?

Technically yes, but we recommend against processing identity documents online. This tool is client-side, but treat personal document data with appropriate caution.

Technical Verification & E-E-A-T Disclaimer

Built on Tesseract.js v5 (Apache 2.0 license), which wraps Tesseract 4.1+ LSTM engine. The LSTM model was trained on 4,500+ fonts across 100+ languages by Google Research. Recognition accuracy benchmarks are maintained by the Tesseract project at github.com/tesseract-ocr.