How to OCR a Scanned PDF in Your Browser

Scanned PDFs are pictures of pages. Copy-paste fails because there is no real text layer. Cloud OCR tools solve that by uploading the scan, which is a hard sell for receipts, IDs, and archived paperwork.

OCR PDF renders pages locally and runs Tesseract in your browser. Limit the page range when you only need a few pages, then download the recognized text as a .txt file.

If Extract Text already finds selectable text, skip OCR and use that instead. OCR is for image-only or scan-heavy files where Extract Text comes back empty.

Accuracy depends on scan quality. Clean, upright pages work best. After OCR, you may still want PDF to Images for visual sharing, or Rotate PDF if the scan is sideways.