PDFStack Tool
OCR PDF — Extract Text from Scanned PDFs Free
Extract readable text from scanned PDFs that contain images rather than selectable text. PDFStack's OCR tool uses PDF.js to parse any embedded text layer, making scanned documents searchable and copyable.
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No file uploads
No account required
Free to use
Private & secure
What is OCR and when do you need it?
Scanned documents and photographed pages are images — they look like text but aren't searchable or copyable. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts those images into actual machine-readable text. PDFStack extracts any text layer already present in the PDF, which covers most modern scan-to-PDF workflows.
How to OCR a PDF
- 1Open OCR PDF in PDFStack.
- 2Upload your scanned PDF.
- 3Click Extract Text.
- 4Download the resulting text file and use it however you need.
All processing happens locally in your browser — no files are uploaded to any server.
Common Uses
Extracting text from a scanned contract, making a scanned report searchable, copying data from a photographed document, converting a scanned book page to text.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it use AI OCR?
PDFStack extracts the embedded text layer from the PDF. For true image-based OCR (where there is no text layer), a server-side AI OCR engine is needed.
What if my PDF has no text layer?
If the PDF is a pure image scan with no text layer, PDFStack will return an empty result. Use a dedicated OCR service like Google Docs (free) or ABBYY for pure-image scans.
What format is the output?
A plain .txt file containing all extracted text with page separators.
Is it private?
Yes. Text extraction runs locally in your browser.