PDF OCR: How to Recognize Text in a Scanned Document

The Scanned PDF Problem

When you scan a document with your smartphone or office scanner, you get a PDF file composed entirely of images. It's impossible to select the text to copy it, search the document, or annotate it cleanly.

How Does OCR Work?

Optical Character Recognition is a process that matches the image of a letter to a Unicode character. Thanks to Tesseract.js, PurePDF runs this engine directly in your browser with remarkable accuracy.

The Local Guarantee

Some services send your scanned documents (which often contain very sensitive data: passports, contracts, notarial deeds) to remote servers for processing. At PurePDF, OCR runs on your machine. The images stay in your RAM.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the OCR accuracy?

On clean, upright documents, accuracy exceeds 95%. Handwriting, however, remains difficult for current engines to interpret.

Which languages are supported?

French and English are natively supported. Many other languages can be added depending on available models.