OCR PDF online: turn scanned pages into text
OCR, or optical character recognition, analyzes visible characters in an image and produces text that can be selected, copied or placed into an editable document.
Updated September 28, 2026 · FreePDF Tools
When OCR is useful
Use OCR when a PDF contains scans, screenshots or image-only pages and normal text extraction returns little or nothing.
What the browser does
The workflow renders each PDF page, runs a local OCR engine over the page image and builds the requested output. Processing can use significant memory, especially for large scans.
What OCR can get wrong
Recognition can confuse similar characters, miss faint marks and struggle with skew, noise, handwriting, dense tables or multi-column layouts. Review the result before relying on it.
Text versus Word output
TXT is a simple recognized-text result. DOCX is more useful when you need editing, but it remains a reconstruction of the recognized content rather than a visual copy of the original page.