OCR that runs on your device, in seven languages
Optical character recognition turns a picture of text into text you can select, search and edit. Here it runs inside your browser: the engine and its language data are downloaded from this site, and your scan is read on your own machine. Available in English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Arabic.
- PDF to MarkdownClean Markdown from any PDF, with OCR for scanned pages.PDF → Markdown (.md)
- PDF to TextPlain text from any PDF, with OCR for scanned pages.PDF → Text (.txt)
- OCR a PDFMake a scanned PDF searchable, without changing how it looks.PDF → Searchable PDF
- Image to TextRead the text in a photo or screenshot, in seven languages.PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF → Text (.txt)
Which one do you need?
- Keep the document, make it searchable. OCR a PDF adds an invisible text layer to scanned pages, leaving the pages themselves untouched — the right choice for contracts, invoices and archives.
- Get the text out. PDF to Text for the words alone, PDF to Markdown when headings and lists matter too. Both OCR scanned pages automatically.
- A photo or a screenshot. Image to Text reads single images, or a batch of them, and accepts a paste from the clipboard.
Accuracy comes from the scan, not the engine
The same tool can produce a perfect transcript or a mess, depending on the input: resolution, contrast, skew and the language you select. Around 300 dpi, upright, high-contrast pages are the easy case. The guide to scanned PDFs covers what to fix first, and the error patterns worth proofreading for — numbers especially, since a wrong digit is invisible to a spellchecker.
Guides
- Extract Text From a Scanned PDF - Step-by-Step GuideExtract text from a scanned PDF free with browser-based OCR - identify scans, run recognition, understand how OCR works, and fix the predictable errors.
- How to Convert PDF to Markdown (Step-by-Step Guide)Learn how to convert PDF to Markdown with online tools, Pandoc, or by hand. Covers tables, scanned PDFs, OCR, and tips for getting clean, usable output.
- Convert a Research Paper PDF to Markdown (Full Guide)Convert academic and research paper PDFs to clean Markdown - handle two-column layouts, equations, citations, and scans, then feed papers to AI or your notes.