OCR Tools
OCR tools: extract text from scans, photos, and PDFs
Use OCR to copy text from an image, turn a scan into an editable Word file, or make a scanned PDF searchable. Free, no sign-up, with honest accuracy notes.
A scan or a photo of text is only a picture. Optical character recognition (OCR) reads the letters in it and gives you real, selectable text. Which tool to use depends on what you want back: plain text you can copy, an editable Word file, or the same PDF made searchable.
OCR is accurate on clean, high-resolution printed text and much weaker on handwriting, low-quality scans, and complex tables. Each tool page explains what to expect.
Which OCR tool should I use?
Image to Text is for a photo or screenshot when you just want the words, and it shows them on the page to copy. Scan to Word gives an editable DOCX from a scanned page or PDF. OCR PDF keeps your original pages exactly as they look and adds an invisible text layer so the PDF becomes searchable.
Recommended workflows
Turn a scanned letter into an editable document
- Convert the scan to Word. Scan to Word
- Proofread, then save as PDF. Word to PDF
Make an archive of scans searchable
- Run OCR to add a text layer to each PDF. OCR PDF
- Shrink the searchable PDF for storage. Compress PDF
Guides
- How to Turn a Scanned Document Into an Editable Word File
Scanned PDFs and photos of pages are just images. Here's how to get a scanned document into Word from a scanner or a phone photo, using free OCR.