OCR — read the text off a scan
Read the text in a scan, on your own machine.
Free and unlimited, on your device. Pro adds batch, searchable PDFs, compress-to-a-size and passwords — $14.99 once. What Pro adds · Buy Pro
Drop your scan here
or click to choose it — pick a language on the next step
You can switch to another tab while this runs — it keeps going in the background. Closing the tab stops it for good; nothing is queued anywhere else.
What to expect
- Clean printed text: near-perfect.
- Faxes and photocopies: good, with occasional wrong characters.
- Handwriting: usually comes back too uncertain to trust, and we name those pages rather than guess.
- Tables keep their words, not their grid.
Here vs. the app
On this page OCR is unlimited and needs no account, one file at a time. The Android app has it too, as Read a scan: it gives you the text on screen, to copy or save as a .txt file.
Free here means all of it, one file at a time, with no account: reading a document of any length, as many documents as you like.
Reading on your device
0%
- Loading the language model waiting
- Reading each page waiting
- Collecting the text waiting
One block per page. Filled blocks are pages already read.
This is your own processor working through the pages, several at a time. There is no queue in front of you and no faster tier — the only thing between you and the result is arithmetic.
Reading documents at work? We are asking firms what they need.
Questions
Is it safe to read the text off a PDF online?
Nothing is uploaded, so there is no copy on a server to trust. The counter at the foot of this page shows bytes sent, and it stays at zero.
Does this work offline?
After the first run, yes. The language model is downloaded once, and then it works with the network off like everything else here.
Is there a file size limit?
60 MB. Past that a browser tab stops being able to write the finished file out and sits unresponsive for minutes — it does not crash, it stops being usable — so we refuse rather than hang.
Do I need an account?
No. It needs no account to use, and there is no limit on how many files you run through it.
Is there a watermark?
No. Nothing is added to the file.
What happens to my file?
It stays on your device. The counter at the foot of every page shows bytes sent and third-party requests, so you can check that rather than take our word for it.