OCR PDF — Extract Text from Any Scanned Document

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) treats each page of your PDF as an image and runs it through a multi-stage pipeline: deskewing, noise removal, contrast normalisation, then a deep-learning character recognition model that maps pixel patterns to Unicode characters. The reconstructed text is embedded as an invisible layer over the original visuals, making the document fully searchable and copy-pasteable without changing a single pixel of the original layout.

Any PDF that contains scanned images of text — documents from a flatbed scanner, camera photos saved as PDF, faxes, printed forms, or archival microfilm scans — will benefit from OCR. If your PDF already contains selectable text (i.e. you can highlight words), it is a 'native' PDF and OCR is not required, though our tool can still extract and reformat its content.

For clean, high-resolution scans at 300 DPI or above, our engine routinely achieves 98–99% character accuracy on standard Latin-script documents. Accuracy naturally varies with scan quality: blurry, low-contrast, or heavily distorted images will score lower. Handwritten text is partially supported but is significantly harder than printed text. We always recommend scanning at 300 DPI minimum with even lighting for best results.

Privacy is fundamental to how we built SmallPDF.us. Every upload travels over TLS 1.3 encryption. Your file is processed in an isolated, single-use compute container that is destroyed immediately after your job completes. Free-plan files are permanently deleted within 1 hour; paid-plan files within 24–72 hours. We never read, index, share, sell, or retain your document content. You can verify our Privacy Policy for full details.

Our OCR engine supports 100+ languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese, Greek, Turkish, Polish, and many more. Language is auto-detected from a sample of the page, but paid users can also specify a language manually to improve accuracy for mixed-language documents.

Free plan users can process up to 2 pages per OCR job — ideal for quick extractions from short documents. Pro and Agency plan users can OCR PDFs of unlimited page count in a single job, and can also submit up to 10 files at once via Batch OCR, making it efficient to process large document sets without re-uploading one by one.

Free users receive a searchable PDF — visually identical to the original but with an embedded, invisible text layer that enables Ctrl+F search, copy-paste, and accessibility tools. Pro and Agency users can additionally export the extracted text as a formatted .docx Word document (preserving paragraphs and basic layout) or as a raw .txt file for data pipelines, translation tools, or content management systems.

Optical character recognition is computationally intensive — each page requires significant GPU time for preprocessing and inference. We provide 1 free OCR run per day to keep the service fast and reliable for all users. Upgrade to Pro for unlimited OCR runs, priority queue access, larger file support, and batch processing. Most Pro users see OCR complete 3–5× faster than the free tier.