QuickMergeOn-device recognition — the OCR engine and selected language data download, but the source file is not uploaded.
Online Free OCR — Scanned PDF and Image to Text
Short answer: To extract text from a scanned PDF or image, run OCR and review the recognised text before copying or downloading it. QuickMerge runs OCR in your browser and supports seven document languages without uploading the file.
Turn scanned PDFs and images into selectable, copyable text in seven document languages. Recognition runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and there is no account to create.
- Free to use
- No sign-up
- 7 languages
- Runs in your browser
- No uploads
How do I extract text from a scanned PDF or image?
Drag & drop an image or PDF
JPG, PNG, WebP, or a scanned PDF · one file at a time
Read Text From Any Scan or Photo — Without Uploading It
OCR (optical character recognition) turns a picture of text — a scanned contract, a photographed receipt, a screenshot, a page from a book — back into real, selectable, searchable text you can copy and edit. This tool does it with the open-source Tesseract engine compiled to WebAssembly, which means the recognition runs on your own device. The one-time language model downloads from a public CDN, but your document is never sent anywhere. That makes it safe for exactly the material people are most nervous about scanning into a random website: IDs, bank statements, medical letters, and legal paperwork.
How to Extract Text From a Scan or Image
- Add your file. Drop in a photo, screenshot, or scanned PDF. Images (JPG, PNG, WebP) and multi-page PDFs are both supported.
- Pick the document language. Choosing the right language dramatically improves accuracy. You can even combine two (for example English + French) for mixed documents.
- Click Extract Text. The first run downloads the language model to your browser (a few seconds); after that it is cached. A progress bar shows recognition page by page.
- Copy or download. The recognized text appears in the box below — copy it to the clipboard or download it as a
.txtfile. Your original file is never modified.
What OCR Is Good At (and Its Limits)
Accuracy is highest on clean, high-contrast documents: a straight 200–300 DPI scan of printed text will usually come back almost perfect. Accuracy drops on blurry phone photos, skewed pages, low light, unusual fonts, or handwriting (Tesseract reads printed text far better than cursive). For the best result, use the sharpest, most level, highest-contrast image you can, and pick the correct language. If a scan is faint, increasing contrast before running OCR helps a lot.
Common Uses
- Make a scanned PDF searchable: pull the text out of a scan so you can search, quote, or reuse it.
- Digitize receipts and invoices: get the numbers and vendor details into text, or use Image to Excel when the source is a structured table.
- Capture text from a photo: a whiteboard, a book page, a sign, a slide — anything you photographed.
- Accessibility: convert an image-only document into text a screen reader can announce. For a text-based PDF that needs editable DOCX output, use PDF to Word.
How It Works & Why It's Private
When you click Extract Text, the tool loads the Tesseract OCR engine (WebAssembly) and selected language data into your browser. For a PDF, each page is rendered to a canvas locally with pdf.js; an image is read directly. Tesseract analyzes the pixels on your device and returns plain text. The engine and language assets come from public CDNs, but the source document is not uploaded. Use the Proof of Privacy steps to inspect the network requests yourself.
Next steps
Before this step
- straighten the pages first — skewed text is the most common cause of poor recognition.
- crop to the text you want — so nothing else competes for attention.
- turn PDF pages into images — when you want to process page by page.
What to do with the result
- get a table rather than plain text — if what you scanned was tabular.
- paste recognised rows into a spreadsheet — when the OCR output is already columnar text.
- save the extracted text as a PDF — to keep a clean, searchable copy.
Browse all OCR and extraction tools, or see every QuickMerge tool.
Wondering how big a file this can take? We measured it: see OCR on the measured limits page, or the browser support matrix.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. There is no sign-up, server page quota or watermark. OCR uses your device, so long documents are limited by available memory and take longer on phones than on a desktop.
It depends entirely on whether the document is uploaded. Most free OCR sites send your file to their servers to process it, which is a data transfer whatever the interface calls it. Here the recognition runs inside your browser tab, so the document is never transmitted — you can confirm that yourself with the method on our proof of privacy page.
No. There is no extension, no desktop application and no add-in, so it also works on a locked-down work computer where you cannot install software.
No. Recognition runs on your device via WebAssembly. The OCR engine and selected language data download from public CDNs, but those requests do not contain the document. Offline availability is not guaranteed.
The dropdown offers English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, plus English + French and English + Spanish for mixed documents. The underlying Tesseract engine supports many more, but those are the ones this tool ships with. Choosing the correct language noticeably improves accuracy.
It is designed for printed text and reads that far more reliably than handwriting. Neat block printing may work; cursive generally will not.
The first time you use a language, the browser downloads its model (a few megabytes) and caches it. Subsequent runs in the same browser are much faster because the model is already stored locally.
Use a sharper, higher-contrast, level image, and make sure the selected language matches the document. Straight 200–300 DPI scans give the best results; blurry or skewed photos give the worst.
Load the PDF here and run recognition; the extracted text can be copied or saved. It runs on your device, so there is no upload, no account and no page limit imposed by a server.
The dropdown offers English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, plus English + French and English + Spanish for mixed documents. Selecting the correct language noticeably improves accuracy — the wrong one is a common cause of poor output on otherwise clean scans.
In order of likelihood: the scan is below about 300 DPI, the page is rotated or skewed, contrast is poor, or the wrong language is selected. Fix those before concluding the file cannot be read — resolution and orientation account for most bad results.
Yes, though a flat scan does better. Shoot straight down rather than at an angle, get even light with no shadow across the page, and fill the frame with the document.
Use image to Excel, which is built to preserve rows and columns. Plain OCR returns a stream of text and loses the table structure. If you already have columnar text, text to Excel will lay it out.
No server quota, because nothing is uploaded — the practical limit is your device memory. Long documents are slower on phones than on a desktop, and recognition is the most demanding operation on the site.
No. This tool returns plain text that you can copy or download as TXT; it does not add an invisible text layer to the original scan. You can put the extracted text into a new, text-only PDF with Text to PDF, but that will not preserve the scanned page layout.
Use image to Excel rather than this page. Plain OCR returns text without structure, so a table comes back as rows of words with the columns lost. That page reconstructs the grid and gives you a workbook you can check before downloading.
Extract the text here, then save it as a PDF to keep a searchable copy alongside the scan. If you need to edit rather than search, export it to Word instead.
No — compress afterwards. Compression reduces image resolution, which is exactly what recognition depends on. Below about 300 DPI, character shapes stop being distinct enough to separate reliably.
Straighten the pages and crop to the text. Skew is the largest single cause of poor recognition, and cropping removes headers and margins that compete for attention. Both take seconds and improve the output measurably.
It will read the characters, but plain OCR loses the column structure. For a photographed table use image to Excel, and shoot straight down rather than at an angle — perspective is what breaks column reconstruction.
No. Tesseract runs as WebAssembly in your browser, so the file stays on your device. Most OCR services process on a server, which is worth knowing given how often the documents involved are records, invoices or correspondence.