OCR PDF
Recognize text in scanned PDFs with OCR. Turn image-only pages into selectable, copyable, downloadable text.
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About OCR PDF
The OCR PDF tool by PdfPixels recognizes text in scanned, image-only PDFs using optical character recognition. Upload the scan and copy or download the recognized text for free — no signup.
OCR PDF reads text out of scanned documents — pages that are really photographs of paper with no selectable text underneath. Each page is rendered at high resolution and passed through optical character recognition, and the recognized text comes back clean enough to copy, search, or edit. It is the fix for faxes, contracts scanned as images, and printed forms where Copy-Paste does nothing. Recognition runs on our servers; documents are processed ephemerally and deleted.
Key Features
- Recognizes text on image-only scanned pages
- High-resolution page rendering before recognition for accuracy
- Copy to clipboard or download as a .txt file
- Falls back to instant extraction when pages already have a text layer
- Free with no signup; server-side processing
Who Uses This Tool?
- 1Making a scanned contract searchable and quotable
- 2Recovering text from faxes and photocopied letters
- 3Digitizing printed forms, invoices, and receipts
- 4Extracting quotes from academic scans for research notes
How to Use OCR PDF
Upload the scanned PDF
Drop a PDF whose text cannot be selected normally.
Run recognition
Pages are rendered and processed by the OCR engine.
Copy or download
Review the recognized text, then copy it or save the .txt file.
Troubleshooting & Common Problems
The text came out garbled
Low-resolution or skewed scans are the usual cause. Re-scan at 300 DPI, straighten the pages, and run OCR again.
Only part of a long document was processed
Runs are page-capped to stay fast. Split the PDF into ranges with Split PDF and process each part.
The PDF already had selectable text
The tool detects a real text layer and returns that instead — it is faster and perfectly accurate. Use the result directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
01What is OCR and when do I need it?
Optical character recognition converts pictures of text into real text. If you cannot select or search words in a PDF, its pages are images — OCR is the fix. If text selects normally, use PDF to Text instead; it is instant and lossless.
02How accurate is the recognition?
Clean 300-DPI scans of typed text recognize very well. Handwriting, heavy noise, low-resolution faxes, and unusual layouts reduce accuracy — proofread anything critical.
03Which languages are supported?
Recognition currently runs with English language data. Mixed documents lose non-Latin characters; check the output for anything critical.
04Is OCR PDF free?
Yes — free with no signup. Because recognition is compute-heavy, runs are capped at a fixed number of pages per pass; process long documents in ranges.
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