# OCR PDF — Free Online (PdfPixels)

> Recognize text in scanned PDFs with OCR. Turn image-only pages into selectable, copyable, downloadable text.

Canonical URL: https://www.pdfpixels.com/tools/ocr-pdf
Processing: server
Cost: free, no signup required for core use.

## Short answer

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.

## About

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

## How to use

1. **Upload the scanned PDF** — Drop a PDF whose text cannot be selected normally.
2. **Run recognition** — Pages are rendered and processed by the OCR engine.
3. **Copy or download** — Review the recognized text, then copy it or save the .txt file.

## FAQ

### What 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.

### How 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.

### Which languages are supported?

Recognition currently runs with English language data. Mixed documents lose non-Latin characters; check the output for anything critical.

### Is 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.

## Limits

- PDF tools: 50 MB per file. Merge: 20 files / 100 MB total / 1000 pages.
- Image tools: 25 MB, 50 MP max. AI tools: 20 MB.
- Rate limits: 20/min per processing route per IP.
- Server-side files are processed ephemerally and purged automatically within 60 minutes.

More tools: https://www.pdfpixels.com/tools — Full machine reference: https://www.pdfpixels.com/llms-full.txt