PDF OCR Online — Extract Text from Scans

Optical character recognition converts pixels—scanned pages, fax images, phone photos—into machine-readable text. Digital PDFs with embedded text do not need OCR; tools like PDF Word Counter read those layers directly. Image-only PDFs display fine in viewers but return empty text until OCR runs.

Our OCR tool renders each scanned PDF page to a high-resolution canvas (or loads your image file), processes it locally, and returns full-page text plus per-word highlights overlaid directly on the document preview.

Cloud OCR APIs are accurate but require sending document bytes to vendor infrastructure—problematic for medical records, legal discovery, payroll, and unreleased contracts. Browser OCR keeps files on your device: the File API loads input, a local worker processes the page, and results stay in memory until you copy or download them.

First use downloads English language data (~few MB). Later runs reuse cached models. No account, API key, or per-page billing.

• Extract text from a scanned tax form before data entry
• OCR a multi-page receipt packet page by page
• Recognize text in a PNG screenshot of a document
• Copy invoice line items into a spreadsheet
• Check whether a scan is readable before archiving

Upload a scanned PDF or image (PNG, JPG, WebP). For multi-page scans, navigate with the pager. Click OCR this page for one page or OCR all pages for the full document. Extracted text appears in the right panel with search. Word highlights show each recognized term labeled above its region on the scanned page.

Copy puts all processed pages into your clipboard (with page headers). Download .txt saves the same content as a plain text file. Confidence scores help you spot weak pages that may need re-scanning.

Browser OCR excels at clean printed text at 200–300 DPI. Handwriting, heavy skew, low contrast, decorative fonts, and complex tables reduce accuracy. Multi-column layouts may merge columns in output order.

For best results: scan straight, use adequate resolution, crop borders, and OCR one page at a time on very large files to avoid tab memory pressure. English is supported today; additional languages can be added in future updates.

PDF OCR extracts text from images—output is plain text you copy or download. PDF Editor adds visual markup (highlights, text boxes, whiteout) and exports a new PDF. PDF Word Counter measures words in existing embedded text layers without OCR. Use OCR first on scans, then edit or count as needed.

Nothing is transmitted to Onbox servers during OCR. Clear the document when finished on a shared kiosk. Downloaded .txt files remain on disk like any export—handle them per your data policy.