PDF & Image OCR Online
Turn scans into selectable text with browser-side OCR: a secure PDF-to-text flow in your tab (Tesseract.js), no uploads. High-DPI page rendering, multilingual UI, copy-ready results.
How to Extract Text from a PDF or Image with OCR (Free, Private)
- Open the PDF OCR page and drop a file or browse — PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, or PDF.
- Each PDF page is rendered locally at high resolution; Tesseract.js runs in a web worker so your tab stays responsive. Watch the progress line for page and percent.
- Copy the plain text from the box, or tap Start again to clear and pick another file. OmniPDF does not upload your document for this recognition step.
FAQ
- Is my file uploaded?
- No. PDF decoding uses pdf.js and OCR uses Tesseract.js in your browser; bytes stay on your device for this flow.
- Will OCR be perfect?
- Accuracy depends on scan quality, fonts, skew, and the language pack. Always review results for contracts, medical, or compliance-critical text.
- Does it work on mobile?
- Yes on modern mobile browsers. Large PDFs may take longer or use more memory; stay on Wi‑Fi for big files if data is limited.
Performance
Since OmniPDF processes files locally using your computer's power (WebAssembly), there is zero upload time. It is 5x faster than cloud-based converters for large files.
Everything You Need to Know About PDF & Image OCR
How OCR runs privately in your browser
- Choose a PDF or an image (PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, or similar). The file is read inside your tab—OmniPDF does not upload it to a conversion cluster. For PDFs, pdf.js decodes each page in a Web Worker while the UI thread stays responsive.
- Each page is rasterized at high resolution so small text stays legible for Tesseract. Canvas preprocessing applies grayscale and contrast boosts to improve recognition on scans, photos, and faint print.
- Tesseract.js performs optical character recognition in a dedicated worker thread. Progress shows the current page and percent complete so you know the job is advancing, not waiting on a remote queue.
- Plain text appears in the editor area; copy it to your clipboard or paste into another app. Warnings flag blank pages, illustration-heavy spreads, or slices where no characters could be inferred—double-check those pages when accuracy is critical.
- Use “Start again” to clear state and pick another document. Close the tab when finished; extracted text stays in volatile memory until you copy or navigate away, after which you control storage on your device.
Technical security, privacy, and why no registration is required
Classic OCR services uploaded sensitive scans to vendor GPU farms. OmniPDF reverses that: pdf.js and Tesseract run locally, so contracts, IDs, and lab notebooks stay inside your browser boundary while models and language data load over HTTPS like static assets—not as an instruction to mirror your file on a SaaS OCR server.
No account is required because OmniPDF never needs our servers to read your pixels; an account would only correlate identity without improving OCR quality. Pair local processing with device hygiene—OS patches, shoulder-surfing awareness, and clipboard policies—before pasting extracted PII into email. For regulated workloads, layer corporate DLP and retention rules on top of on-device conversion.
Five OCR scenarios that benefit from local processing
- Researchers pulling quotes from scanned journal PDFs without routing papers through a third-party OCR API.
- Operations teams digitizing phone photos of shipping labels when handheld scanners are offline.
- Students extracting passages from lecture slide PDFs to build accessible notes in another editor.
- Legal interns triaging discovery PDFs for keywords before escalating to certified review tools.
- Front-desk staff capturing visitor-form text from mixed-language scans when desktop OCR suites are locked down.