# Extract Text from Images and PDFs (OCR) - Free, No Upload

Page: https://hirantha.me/tools/ocr
Part of: Hirantha Sandaruwan Lakshan free tools (https://hirantha.me/tools)
Updated: 2026-07-31

Pull copyable text out of a photo or scan.

This is a free tool that runs in the browser: open the page to use it. File tools process files on the visitor's own device; files are never uploaded or stored. No account, sign-up, payment or watermark.

Turn a photo, scan, or PDF into copyable, searchable text. Recognition runs entirely in your browser tab using the open-source Tesseract engine - the image never leaves your device.

The first time you run this tool, your browser downloads a small text-recognition engine and an English language model (about 6 MB total, cached afterward so it's instant on later visits).

Each page is analysed for lines, words, and characters, and the recognised text is assembled in reading order.

For a PDF, every page is rendered as an image first, then read in sequence - the result keeps a page separator so you can tell where each page's text starts.

Q: How accurate is it?
A: Very good on clean, well-lit printed text and typical scans. Handwriting, low resolution, heavy skew, or unusual fonts reduce accuracy - straightening and cropping the source image first helps a lot.

Q: Does it only work in English?
A: Right now, yes - only the English text model is bundled. Mixed-language pages will still attempt recognition, but non-English words are more likely to come out wrong.

Q: Why does the first run take longer than the second?
A: The recognition engine and language model download once and are cached by your browser. Every run after that skips the download entirely.

Q: Is my image or PDF uploaded anywhere?
A: No. Rendering, recognition, and text extraction all happen locally in your browser tab.

Q: Can it keep the original layout, like columns or tables?
A: No. The output is plain text in reading order. Columns and tables lose their structure, which is the normal trade-off for text extraction without a layout engine.

Q: Does it work on handwriting?
A: Poorly. The engine is trained on printed type. Neat block capitals sometimes come through; ordinary cursive generally doesn't.

Q: What image resolution works best?
A: Enough that the text is comfortably readable when you look at it - roughly 300 DPI for a scan. Too low and characters blur together; far higher mostly just slows things down.

Q: Can I get a searchable PDF instead of plain text?
A: Not currently. You get the recognised text, which you can paste wherever you need it.

Sources: Optical character recognition - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition); WebAssembly - MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly)

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