Extract text from a scanned PDF (local OCR)
Recognize the text in a scanned PDF on your own device and turn it into Markdown, without uploading the document.
About this tool
A scanned PDF is really a photo of each page: there is no text to select, search or copy. Reading it with an AI, or searching inside it, needs OCR (optical character recognition).
Almost every free OCR service uploads your document to a server. Here the recognition engine is downloaded once from this same site (about 3 MB) and runs inside your browser: the scan never leaves your machine. Afterwards it is cached and works offline.
The result is not a flat dump: we reuse the same structure rules as for a text PDF, so large titles become headings and paragraphs are grouped. And redaction runs over the recognized text just the same.
How it works
- 1
Drop the scanned PDF.
- 2
If it has no selectable text, an "Extract text with OCR" button appears.
- 3
Wait for recognition (you can cancel at any point).
- 4
Review the text, with personal data already flagged, and copy or download it.
Questions
- Does OCR work offline too?
- Yes, after the first run. The engine and the language models are cached in your browser; from then on you can recognize documents with WiFi off.
- How accurate is it?
- We use Tesseract's fast models for Spanish and English. With a sharp, straight scan the result is good; with skewed, shadowed or low-resolution photos it degrades. Scan at 300 dpi when you can.
- Why does it take a while?
- Recognizing text is heavy work and it happens on your processor, not on a server. A few seconds per page is normal; you see the progress and can cancel.
- Does it read handwriting?
- Not reliably. Tesseract is designed for printed text.