Scanned PDF to text
Read the words out of a PDF whose pages are pictures.
- Runs on your device — the file is never sent anywhere
- No sign-up, no watermarks, no daily quotas
- Free, with no limit on how often you use it
How it works
A scanned PDF looks like a document and behaves like a photograph: you cannot select the text, search it or copy it, because there is no text in the file at all — only pictures of one. Ordinary extraction returns nothing, which is exactly when this is the tool you want.
How it works
Each page is rendered to an image and passed through optical character recognition in the page. Nothing is uploaded; the recognition engine and its English data are downloaded once from a public CDN and cached by your browser.
Use the plain extractor first
If the PDF already contains real text, the ordinary PDF text extraction tool is instant and perfectly accurate, because it reads the text rather than guessing at pictures of it. Come here only when that one returns nothing.
It is capped by page count, deliberately
Recognition takes real time per page on your own device — several seconds each. The default of five pages keeps a first attempt quick; raise it once you know the quality is good enough to be worth the wait.
What affects accuracy
Resolution, straightness and contrast, in that order. A clean 300 dpi scan of printed text reads very well. A photograph of a page taken at an angle, a faint fax, or a low-resolution scan will produce mistakes or nothing at all. Rendering at 300 dpi helps, but it cannot rescue a bad original.
Scanned PDF to text — questions
Why did the ordinary text extractor return nothing?
Because the pages are images. That is what this tool is for.
Is my document uploaded?
No. Rendering and recognition both happen in your browser.
Why is it limited to a few pages?
Each page takes several seconds on your own device. The limit is adjustable.
How accurate is it?
Very good on clean printed scans, poor on faint, skewed or low-resolution ones. Handwriting is not supported.