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What is PDF OCR? Turning scans into copyable text

How scanned PDFs differ from text-layer PDFs, and how browser-side extraction works.

Many scans are full-page images inside a PDF — you cannot select text until OCR runs.

If the PDF already has a text layer, extraction is faster and usually more accurate.

This tool runs locally: prefer the text layer, then rasterize and OCR scan pages.

You get plain text for copying — not a searchable dual-layer PDF.

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