👁️ OCR PDF WASM

For clean, well-scanned documents at 200-300 DPI, Tesseract typically achieves 95-99% word accuracy in English. Accuracy drops with: low scan resolution, skewed pages, unusual fonts, handwriting, and complex layouts. The result panel shows a confidence score for each page so you can see exactly how well it worked.

This tool includes 14 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Hindi. Selecting multiple languages improves accuracy on documents that mix languages, but slows OCR significantly.

A searchable PDF (also called OCR'd PDF) looks visually identical to the original, but includes an invisible text layer overlaid on top of the image. You can select, copy, and search the text, and search engines can index it. Most PDF editors and viewers will find the text when you use Ctrl+F, but you won't see it unless you try to select it.

Roughly 5-15 seconds per page on a modern desktop, depending on DPI and page complexity. At 300 DPI with multiple languages, it can take 30+ seconds per page. A 50-page document might take 10-20 minutes. The first page is slower because Tesseract has to download the language data (a few MB) — subsequent pages are faster. Everything runs locally, so you can leave the tab open and come back.

No — not reliably. Tesseract is designed for printed text. Handwriting recognition requires different neural network models (like those used in Google Lens or Microsoft OneNote) which aren't available in a lightweight WASM package. For handwritten documents you'd need a cloud OCR service.

No. Everything runs in your browser — Tesseract is compiled to WebAssembly and executed locally. Your files never leave your device. Only the Tesseract engine and language files (a few MB) are downloaded once from a CDN.