How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF Using OCR

Scanned PDFs are essentially images — you can't select text, search within them or copy content. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts them into real, searchable text. Here's how to do it entirely in your browser, for free.

What is OCR?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is technology that analyses an image and identifies individual characters, words and layout to produce machine-readable text. Modern OCR tools can handle printed text in dozens of languages, various fonts and sizes, and even partially skewed or degraded documents.

RightPDFKit uses Tesseract.js — the leading open-source OCR engine developed by Google, running entirely in your browser via WebAssembly.

How to OCR a PDF — step by step

1. Open the OCR tool on RightPDFKit.
2. Upload your scanned PDF or image-based PDF.
3. Choose which pages to process — all pages or specific ones.
4. Click Run OCR.
5. The extracted text appears in the panel. Copy it or download as a .txt file.

Tips for better OCR results

• Scan quality — 300 DPI or higher gives the best accuracy. Phone photos work but may be less accurate than a flatbed scanner.
• Straight pages — straighten skewed scans first using the Rotate tool before running OCR.
• High contrast — black text on white background works best. Faded, yellowed or low-contrast documents may produce errors.
• Printed text — OCR works best on printed text. Handwriting recognition is much less reliable.
• Language — Tesseract.js defaults to English. For other languages, let us know and we can look at adding language options.

Common OCR use cases

• Extracting text from scanned contracts or legal documents
• Making old scanned books and reports searchable
• Pulling data from scanned receipts or invoices for accounting
• Converting paper forms to digital text for editing
• Extracting content from image-based PDFs from government or banks

Is my scanned document sent to a server?

No. Tesseract.js runs entirely inside your browser. Your scanned document is processed on your device — nothing is uploaded anywhere. This is critical for sensitive documents like medical records, legal papers or financial statements.