How to OCR a PDF Free — Extract Text from Scanned Documents

What Is PDF OCR?

Scanned PDFs are essentially images — photographs of printed pages. You cannot select, search, or copy the text. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads the image content and extracts the text as selectable, copyable data.

How to OCR a PDF

1. Open the PDF OCR tool
2. Upload your scanned PDF
3. The tool processes each page with OCR
4. View and copy the extracted text from all pages

Multi-page documents are processed page by page. All processing runs in your browser — the PDF is not uploaded to any server.

Scanned PDF vs Native PDF

If your PDF already has selectable text (try Ctrl+A to select all), you do not need OCR — use our PDF to Text tool instead, which is faster and more accurate. OCR is only needed when the PDF contains images of text (scans, photographs of documents).