OCR PDF
Run OCR on scanned PDFs entirely in your browser — recognize English, Chinese, Japanese and more, then copy or save the text.
Drop a file here or click to choose
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data never leaves your device — it is not uploaded to any server.
How to use
- 1Drop a scanned PDF and pick the document's language.
- 2Optionally limit OCR to specific pages, then click Run OCR.
- 3Copy the recognized text or download it as a .txt file.
OCR PDF
Scanned contracts, receipts and books have no selectable text — OCR gives them one. Each page is rendered in your browser and read by the Tesseract engine, with language support for English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German.
On first use your browser downloads the OCR engine and the language model (10–20 MB) from a public CDN — that is the only network traffic, and it never includes your document. Recognition itself happens on your device.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the first run need an internet connection?
The Tesseract OCR engine and its language model are fetched from a CDN on first use (10–20 MB, cached afterwards). The PDF itself is never uploaded — recognition runs locally once the model is loaded.
How can I improve recognition accuracy?
Scan at 300 DPI, keep the page straight, and choose the correct language. Clean black-and-white pages reach well over 90% accuracy; crooked photos with shadows do much worse.
Can it read handwriting?
Not reliably. Tesseract is trained on printed text — neat typography works, cursive handwriting usually produces garbage.
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Embed this tool
Put this tool on your own site with one line — it runs entirely in the visitor's browser.
<iframe src="https://zoyku.com/en/tools/ocr-pdf?embed=1" width="100%" height="640" style="border:0;border-radius:16px" title="Zoyku — ocr-pdf" loading="lazy"></iframe>