PDF to Text (OCR)
Extract text from scanned PDFs
Last updated:OCR extracts text from images and PDFs. LlamaPDF first checks whether the PDF already contains a selectable text layer and copies it directly — fast and lossless. If not (or for images), it falls back to Tesseract.js running entirely in your browser, supporting 100+ languages with optional auto-detection.
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How to extract text from a PDF or image with OCR
- 1
Upload your scanned PDF or image file by dragging it into the box above or clicking to browse. The tool supports PDF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, and WebP formats.
- 2
Select the language of the text in your document for optimal recognition accuracy. For multi-language documents, select all applicable languages. The OCR engine will analyze the entire document structure, including columns, tables, and headers.
- 3
Click Extract Text to run optical character recognition on your document. Review and copy the extracted text, or download it as a text file. All OCR processing runs directly in your browser using advanced recognition algorithms — your documents are never uploaded to any server, ensuring complete privacy.
Why use our OCR tool?
Scanned documents, photographed pages, and image-based PDFs lock valuable text inside pictures. You cannot search, copy, edit, or reuse that content without first converting it to machine-readable text. Our OCR tool solves this by analyzing the visual structure of your document and extracting every word with high accuracy. It handles everything from single-page receipts to multi-page scanned contracts and academic papers — recognizing printed text across dozens of languages and preserving the reading order of complex layouts including multi-column pages and tables.
Because the entire process runs locally in your browser, your sensitive documents — legal contracts, medical records, financial statements — never leave your device. There is no upload, no cloud processing, and no third-party access. For simpler tasks like extracting text from a single photo or screenshot, our image-to-text tool provides a streamlined experience. Once you have your extracted text, convert it into a proper document with the text to PDF converter, or edit the original PDF directly. If you need to work with scanned tables, extract the text here and then use the JSON-CSV converter to structure your data.
What is OCR?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that converts images of text — whether from scanned documents, photographs, or image-based PDFs — into machine-readable, editable text. OCR engines analyze the shapes, patterns, and spatial relationships of characters in an image to identify letters, numbers, and symbols. Modern OCR supports hundreds of languages and can handle a wide range of fonts, sizes, and layouts. It is the foundational technology behind document digitization, searchable PDF creation, automated data entry, and accessibility tools that read printed text aloud.