How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF
Using PDF Scanner to extract text from scanned documents is simple. Upload your scanned or image-based PDF using the tool above. You can drag and drop the file directly or click to browse your device. Once uploaded, select the language of the document and choose your preferred resolution — High resolution is recommended for best accuracy.
Click "Extract Text (OCR)" to start the process. PDF Scanner renders each page at high resolution and passes it through the Tesseract.js OCR engine running entirely in your browser. The extracted text appears in a text box where you can review it, copy it to your clipboard, or download it as a plain text file.
OCR works best with clean, high-contrast scans of printed text. For multi-page documents, each page is processed sequentially. You can also save the extracted text directly to Google Drive for easy access across your devices.
PDFScanner.io supports over 100 languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Hindi. The OCR engine runs completely offline after the initial language model download, making it a secure choice for confidential documents like contracts, medical records, and financial statements.
FAQ
OCR PDF — FAQ
How accurate is the OCR?▼
Tesseract.js achieves 95%+ accuracy on clean, high-resolution scans of printed text in supported languages. Accuracy decreases with blurry images, unusual fonts, complex layouts, or handwriting.
Why is OCR slow on multi-page PDFs?▼
OCR is computationally intensive. Each page is rendered to a high-resolution canvas and then processed by the Tesseract engine running in WebAssembly. A 10-page document may take 30–90 seconds depending on your device's CPU speed.
Can I OCR handwritten text?▼
Tesseract is optimised for printed text. Handwriting OCR requires specialised neural models and will generally produce poor results with this tool.
Why is the first run slow?▼
Tesseract.js downloads a trained language model file (~10 MB) on its first use. This is cached by your browser, so subsequent runs are faster. You can also use the tool offline once the model is downloaded.
How do I save extracted text to Google Drive?▼
After OCR completes, click the "Save to Google Drive" button below the text output. PDF Scanner will ask you to authorize access on first use. Once authorized, your extracted text saves directly to your Drive as a text file.
Is my Google Drive data safe with PDF Scanner?▼
Yes. PDFScanner.io only requests permission to save files to your Drive. We cannot read, access, or modify your existing Google Drive files. All OCR processing happens entirely in your browser.
Can I use OCR PDF without a Google account?▼
Absolutely. The copy and download features work without any account. Google Drive saving is completely optional — just an extra convenience for cloud storage users.