Extract Text from PDF (OCR) — Online

Recognize text in a PDF (including scanned pages) using Tesseract OCR — Russian and English.

Drop a file or click to choose
pdf — до 25 МБ
Files are deleted right after processing — we do not store or view them.

OCR (optical character recognition) for a PDF is what you need when a document is really just a set of images rather than text — a scanned contract, a page from a book, a photographed certificate. In that kind of PDF you can't select or copy text, or find it with search, because there's no text layer inside the file at all.

To recognize text in a PDF, upload your file above, choose the result format, and download the finished file. Each page is rendered to an image, then recognized by the Tesseract OCR engine in Russian and English. Processing happens entirely on the server, and the source file is deleted right after conversion.

Two result formats are available. TXT is the plain extracted text with no formatting — handy for copying, searching, or further processing. PDF (with a text layer) is the same document you uploaded, but with an invisible layer of recognized text over the page images: it looks like the original, but the text can be selected, copied, and found with Ctrl+F. Recognition quality depends on how clear the scan is — handwriting, heavily blurred, or rotated pages recognize worse than crisp printed text. Maximum file size is 25 MB.

Frequently asked questions

TXT is just the extracted text with no formatting. A PDF with a text layer looks like the original document, but the text on it can be selected, copied, and searched — ideal when you need to keep the page's appearance.
Tesseract OCR is built for printed text. Neat handwriting sometimes gets recognized partially, but accuracy is noticeably lower than for print.
Russian and English at the same time — enough for most documents and mixes of the two (forms with Russian text and English terms, for example).
The file is processed on the server and deleted right after the response. Content isn't stored or logged. Maximum size is 25 MB.