How OCR works here
Each page is rendered as an image, then analysed by an on-device OCR engine that recognises characters and words from the image. The whole process runs locally — your scanned document is never uploaded anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Why is OCR slower than other tools on this site?
Character recognition is computationally heavy, and running it entirely on your device (rather than a fast server) trades some speed for keeping your document completely private.
Does this work on handwriting?
OCR is built and trained for printed text. Handwritten text recognition is far less reliable and not the focus of this tool.
What if the PDF already has selectable text?
If your PDF already contains a text layer (not a scanned image), our PDF to Word tool will extract it faster and more accurately than OCR.