OCR PDF Online — Free, In-Browser, No Upload (English)
You have a scanned PDF — a photo of paper, not selectable text. You can read it with your eyes, but you can't copy from it, search it, or edit it. OCR (optical character recognition) is what turns those pixels back into letters.
Quick answer
Open the OCR PDF tool, drop your scanned PDF, pick Word or Text, click Run OCR, download. Engine loads once (~15 MB), then runs per-page in your browser.
Step-by-step
- Go to getconvertify.me/ocr-pdf.
- Drop the scanned PDF (max 50 pages, 80 MB per run).
- Pick output: Word (.docx) or Plain text (.txt).
- Click Run OCR.
- Wait — ~5–15 seconds per page on a laptop, longer on phones.
- Download Word file or text file.
Is my PDF actually scanned?
Open it in any reader and try to select text with your cursor:
- Cursor highlights words → has a text layer → use PDF extract or PDF to Word (much faster, no OCR needed).
- Cursor draws a rectangle → no text layer → you need OCR (this tool).
Most "PDFs from a scanner" or "PDFs of phone-camera documents" are scanned. PDFs exported from Word / Pages / browsers are not.
How accurate is it?
Tesseract.js v5 — same engine the open-source world has used for two decades:
| Source | Typical accuracy |
|---|---|
| Laser/inkjet print, flatbed scan | 95–99% |
| Receipts, books | 90–96% |
| Phone photos in good light | 85–93% |
| Phone photos with glare / shadow | 70–85% |
| Handwriting | Don't bother — it's not built for that |
Always proofread OCR output before using it for anything important.
Why this is different
Most free OCR tools require uploading your scan to their server. That's a no-go for:
- Tax returns
- Medical records
- Contracts
- HR paperwork
- Anything internal
Convertify runs Tesseract entirely in your browser tab via WebAssembly. Your scan never leaves your device. The first run downloads ~15 MB of OCR engine + English language data (cached after) — that's the only network traffic, and it goes to your browser, not us.
Private — runs in your browser
Engine + your file both stay local. No account, no watermark, no server.
Related
- PDF extract — for PDFs that already have selectable text (faster)
- PDF to Word — same, for editable .docx output
- Compress PDF — shrink the scanned PDF after OCR
Common questions
Why is the first run slow? The engine + English language data (~15 MB total) downloads once and caches in your browser. Subsequent runs skip that step.
Why 50-page limit? Mobile browsers run out of memory above that. We'd rather fail clearly than crash your tab.
Multi-language? English only in v1. Other languages coming — each adds ~5 MB of data to download.
Does it preserve layout? Output is text in reading order, not pixel-positioned. For layout-preserving OCR (searchable PDF with invisible text behind the image), that's on the roadmap.
Daily limit? Free tier: 3 OCR runs a day. Upgrade for unlimited.