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orOptical Character Recognition turns scanned pages and photos of text into real, selectable, searchable text — free, entirely in your browser. If you've ever received a “PDF” that's really just photos of pages, this is the tool for you.
We run a real OCR engine (Tesseract) right in your browser — no server, no uploads. Drop a scanned PDF or a photo of text and get the recognized text back as a downloadable .txt file. The first run downloads the engine (~17 MB, one time); afterwards it's all local.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads text inside images — like scanned pages — and turns it into selectable text. You need it when you can't select or search the text in your PDF; that means it's a scan, not a real text document.
Try selecting a sentence with your mouse. If you can highlight it, the PDF has a text layer and you can use PDF to Markdown today. If not, it's a scan and needs OCR.
Printed text works well; handwriting is hit-or-miss. Clean, high-contrast scans at 300 DPI give the best results.
No — if you can select the text with your mouse, use PDF to Markdown instead: it's faster and perfectly accurate. OCR is for scans and photos only.