OCR — Extract Text from Images and PDFs Free

How to use

1. Choose an image (JPG/PNG) or a scanned PDF.
2. Watch the progress bar — recognition runs on your device.
3. Copy the extracted text.

About this tool

Optical character recognition is how a photo of a notice, a scanned invoice or an image-only PDF becomes copyable text. This tool runs Tesseract's recognition engine inside your browser tab — the same open engine that powers many paid services — so your document is never sent to a third-party OCR server. Point it at a photo of printed text or a scanned PDF page and copy the result straight into an email or editor. Your file never leaves this page — everything runs in your browser, there is no upload endpoint on this site, and the document is dropped from memory when you close the tab. Browser-based OCR changed the privacy math of “image to text”: screenshots, scanned contracts, ID cards and whiteboard photos are exactly the files people hesitate to upload anywhere, so this OCR text extractor runs recognition locally — the recognition engine downloads once, then works offline on the canvas in front of it. Accuracy follows four controllable factors: resolution (300 DPI-equivalent or higher), straightness (a 5° skew costs more accuracy than a low-end camera), contrast (dark text on light background beats light-on-dark every time), and print versus handwriting — machine print at reasonable quality lands near-perfect, neat handwriting lands usable, cursive lands creative. Multi-language pages work when the matching language pack is selected before recognition. After extraction, the copy and download buttons give plain text with line breaks preserved — ready for notes, translation tools or a spreadsheet.

FAQ

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