OCR Scanned PDF & Image Reader

OCR versus copying PDF text

Scanned PDFs contain pictures of text, so a normal PDF text extractor returns little or nothing. Optical character recognition (OCR) reads the text in those pictures. For PDFs that already contain selectable text, use the existing document text extractor instead.

Three languages and local processing

Choose English, Nederlands or Français. The engine, WebAssembly and recognition models are downloaded from this website and run locally using a browser worker. Pages are rasterized locally. OCR confidence is indicative, not a guarantee; tables, handwriting, skewed images and tiny fonts can lower quality.

Supported downloads

Export a plain TXT transcript and a JSON report with per-page confidence and text. The tool also exports a searchable image-based PDF with a non-visible OCR text layer when supported. Proofread all results before relying on them, especially invoice amounts and official documents.

Limits

For stability the tool accepts at most eight PDF pages and a 25 MB file, with a resolution cap on images. Nothing is uploaded to our servers.

Are my files uploaded?

No. Text recognition runs with JavaScript and WebAssembly running in your browser tab. Your files are read from your device and the results are created on your device; nothing is sent to gratistools.be or anyone else, which is also why there are no queues, daily limits or watermarks. See the privacy page.