Extract text from scanned PDFs, photos, and image files in seconds — no server uploads, no account needed. Everything runs right in your browser.
Drop your file here or click to browse
PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, and BMP — up to 50 MB
Got a scanned PDF or a photo of a document? Flipper File's OCR tool reads the text right out of it — no server uploads, no account required. Just drop in your file, pick your language, and get a clean block of plain text you can copy or download in seconds.
How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF
- Upload your file — drag and drop or click to browse. Supports PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, and BMP files up to 50 MB.
- Choose your language — select the language the document is written in (English, Spanish, French, German, and more).
- Click "Extract Text" — the OCR engine will render each page and read the text. For multi-page PDFs this may take a moment.
- Review the result — your extracted text appears in a text box, organized by page if the file has multiple pages.
- Copy or download — hit "Copy Text" to paste it anywhere, or "Download .txt" to save it as a plain text file.
Why Use Flipper File to OCR a PDF?
- Runs entirely in your browser — your file never leaves your device. There are no uploads to a third-party server, ever.
- Handles multi-page PDFs — processes every page automatically and labels them in the output so you know where text came from.
- Supports multiple languages — choose from English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, and more.
- Works on images too — not just PDFs. Drop in a JPG, PNG, TIFF, or BMP scan and extract text the same way.
- Zero friction — no account, no watermarks, no install, no limits. Open the page and go.
- High-resolution rendering — PDFs are rendered at 2× resolution before OCR processing, improving accuracy on small or dense text.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OCR and how does it work?
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It's a technology that analyzes an image of text — whether that's a scanned page, a photograph, or a rendered PDF — and converts it into machine-readable characters. Flipper File uses Tesseract, the industry-standard open-source OCR engine originally developed by HP and now maintained by Google, running directly in your browser via WebAssembly.
Can I OCR a regular (non-scanned) PDF?
If your PDF already contains embedded text (meaning you can click and highlight words in it), you don't technically need OCR — the text is already there. Our tool will still process it, but a dedicated PDF text extractor or PDF to Word converter would be faster. OCR is most useful for PDFs created from scans, photos, or faxes where the text exists only as an image.
How accurate is the text extraction?
Accuracy depends heavily on the quality of the source document. Clean, high-contrast scans of printed text typically yield 95–99% accuracy. Handwriting, unusual fonts, low-resolution scans, and documents with complex layouts (tables, columns, rotated text) will produce less reliable results. You can improve results by scanning at 300 DPI or higher.
What file types does this tool support?
You can upload PDF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, TIF, and BMP files. The tool also accepts WebP images. Maximum file size is 50 MB.
Is my document safe and private?
Yes. All processing happens locally in your browser using WebAssembly. Your file is never uploaded to Flipper File's servers or any third-party service. Once you close the browser tab, no trace of your document remains.
What languages are supported?
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Russian. Select your language before clicking Extract — using the wrong language setting will significantly reduce accuracy.
Does it work on handwritten documents?
Tesseract has limited support for handwriting. It was designed primarily for printed text. Very neat, printed handwriting may partially work, but cursive or informal handwriting typically produces poor results. For handwriting, a dedicated handwriting OCR service would be a better fit.
Can I OCR a password-protected PDF?
No. Password-protected PDFs cannot be rendered without first removing the password. You'll need to decrypt the PDF first — you can use a PDF password remover tool — then run OCR on the unlocked version.