Built for speed, privacy, and simplicity.
Process files in seconds with our optimized engine
Files processed locally, never uploaded to servers
Use on any device, any browser, anytime
Turn scanned PDFs into searchable, selectable text. Because typing from screenshots is no fun.
Got a scanned PDF where you cannot select or search the text? OCR (Optical Character Recognition) fixes that by recognizing the text and making it digital.
Desktop OCR software used to be expensive and complicated. You would buy a boxed copy of ABBYY FineReader or Adobe Acrobat Pro, install it, fight with the settings, and wait forever while it processed. These days, you do not need any of that. An online OCR tool is faster, simpler, and free. Just drop your file and it does its thing. The best part about PDFNeo's OCR is that it runs entirely in your browser. Your scanned document never gets uploaded to a server. Think about that — if you are OCR'ing a confidential contract, medical records, or personal documents, do you really want to send them to some company's cloud to get processed? Of course not. Local processing means total privacy. And it works on any device with a browser. Phone, tablet, Chromebook — all of it.
Making scanned documents searchable. You scanned a stack of paper documents and now they are just image PDFs. You cannot search for a name, you cannot copy a paragraph, you cannot find anything. OCR turns them into real, searchable PDFs.
Extracting text from images or screenshots. You have a screenshot of text or a photo of a whiteboard with notes and you want the actual text. OCR reads the text from the image so you can copy and paste it somewhere useful.
Digitizing old paper archives. You have boxes of old documents — invoices, contracts, letters — and you want to digitize them so you can find things. Scan them all, run OCR, and suddenly you can search years worth of paper in seconds.
Making PDFs accessible. Scanned PDFs are not accessible to screen readers because there is no actual text, just images of text. OCR adds the text layer that assistive technology needs to read the document aloud.
Clean up your scans first. The better the input image quality, the better the OCR results. Straighten skewed pages, remove dust and speckles, make sure the text is in focus. A little cleanup before OCR saves a lot of correction afterward.
Know the language of your document. OCR works best when it knows what language to expect. If your document is in Spanish, German, or any language other than English, the results might be less accurate. Most OCR engines are optimized for English first.
Proofread the output, especially for important documents. OCR is good — really good these days — but it is not perfect. Numbers, similar-looking letters (l vs 1, O vs 0), and unusual fonts can trip it up. Always double-check critical text like names, dates, and figures.
Start with the highest resolution you have. OCR needs clear text to work with. If you have a choice between a 72 DPI scan and a 300 DPI scan, use the 300 DPI one every time. The difference in accuracy is night and day.
For clean, high-quality scans with standard fonts, accuracy is usually 95-99 percent. For lower quality scans, handwritten text, or unusual fonts, accuracy drops. Always proofread important documents.
Not well. OCR is designed for printed text. Handwriting varies too much from person to person. Stick with typed or printed documents for best results.
Nope. Everything runs locally in your browser using JavaScript OCR libraries. Your document never leaves your device. Close the tab and it is gone from memory.
Not at all. OCR adds an invisible text layer on top of the original image. The scanned image itself stays exactly as it was. You still see the original document — you just can now select the text on it.
The OCR engine works best with English. It can handle other Latin-script languages with varying degrees of accuracy. Non-Latin scripts like Chinese, Arabic, or Japanese may have limited support.
Right now the tool OCRs the entire document. If you only need one page, extract that page first with the extract tool, then run OCR on just that page.
It depends on the document length and quality. A single page might take a few seconds. A 100-page book could take a few minutes. Your device's processing speed also affects it.