Extract text from your scanned PDFs
The OCR PDF tool uses optical character recognition to convert scanned documents, photos of text, and image-based PDFs into fully selectable, searchable, and copyable text. Whether you scanned a contract, received a non-editable invoice, or photographed a handwritten note, this tool extracts the text layer accurately, no manual retyping needed.
Your files never leave your device. Processing happens entirely in the browser using local computation: no file is uploaded to any server, no account is required, and nothing is stored or logged. Free to use, with no watermarks added to your output.
OCR PDF is useful whenever you need to work with text locked inside an image. Typical scenarios include extracting clauses from scanned legal contracts to paste into a word processor, pulling figures from a photographed invoice for accounting purposes, or converting archived paper documents, old reports, letters, printed receipts, into editable digital text for indexing or search.
Yes. This is the primary use case for OCR. When a document is scanned, the resulting PDF contains only an image of the page, there is no underlying text layer. OCR analyzes the visual content of each page and reconstructs the characters as selectable text. The accuracy depends on scan quality: clear, high-contrast scans in standard fonts produce the best results.
The tool is free with no registration. Processing is handled locally in your browser, so practical limits depend on your device's memory and processing power rather than artificial caps. Very large documents with many high-resolution pages may take longer to process, but there is no server-side quota or paywall blocking access.
If a PDF is encrypted and requires a password to open, you will need to unlock it before OCR can process it. Use the iSharePDF unlock tool first to remove the password restriction, then run OCR on the resulting file. For files that are read-only but not password-protected, OCR works directly.
Browser-based OCR has improved substantially through 2025 and 2026 with modern recognition engines running via WebAssembly. For clean, typed documents in common Latin fonts, accuracy is comparable to dedicated desktop tools. Accuracy decreases with low-resolution scans, unusual fonts, heavy formatting, or handwritten text. If precision is critical, verify the extracted text against the original page.
The extracted text is provided as plain text, which you can copy directly from the interface or download as a .txt file. Plain text is the most portable format and can be pasted into any word processor, spreadsheet, email, or database. If you need the result in a formatted document, paste the extracted text into your preferred editor and apply the structure you need.