Free PDF OCR that respects your privacy
Recognize text from any scanned PDF in seconds. No uploads, no sign-up, no watermark — Be My PDF runs recognition directly in your browser so your documents never leave your device.
- Free — no daily page cap, no watermark, no email
- In-browser: pdf.js pulls the text layer locally
- AI OCR tier for image-only scans and photos of documents
- Handles multi-page PDFs, invoices, contracts, books
- Latin scripts free; CJK, Cyrillic, Arabic on Pro
- Works on any device — Mac, Windows, iOS, Android
How it works
Open the OCR tool
Launch Extract Text — no installs, no logins, no wait.
Drop your scanned PDF
Drag any PDF in. If it has a text layer, we extract it locally. If not, AI OCR takes over.
Get searchable, editable text
Download a .txt with all recognized content, ready for Word, Docs, or your favorite editor.
What PDF OCR actually does
Every PDF is either a container of real characters or a wrapper around images that happen to look like text. Real characters are trivial to extract. Image-based PDFs — scans, phone photos, faxes — are opaque to normal copy-paste. PDF OCR bridges the gap: it renders each page, isolates glyphs, matches them to characters, and rebuilds a real text layer. The output is searchable, editable, indexable, and translatable. Be My PDF gives you both extraction and recognition in one tool so you never have to guess which kind of PDF you're holding.
How Be My PDF compares to Adobe, Smallpdf, and iLovePDF
Adobe Acrobat Pro costs about $240/year and uploads your PDF to Adobe's cloud for OCR. Smallpdf and iLovePDF are free at low volumes but throttle to 2 files/hour, add watermarks on the free tier, and require sign-up beyond that. Be My PDF has no page cap, no watermark, no login, and no upload — recognition runs locally in your browser tab. For anything under NDA, that difference matters more than any feature comparison.
Common PDF OCR use cases
Legal teams OCR discovery PDFs so they're searchable in review platforms. Accountants OCR scanned receipts and invoices for expense reports and audit trails. Researchers OCR archived journals and out-of-print books to quote them. Recruiters OCR scanned résumés so ATS systems can parse them. Journalists OCR leaked document dumps to grep for names and dates. Individual users OCR their own paper records — tax returns, medical files, insurance policies — to make them searchable in their personal drives.
Frequently asked questions
Ready to extract text from your PDF?
Zero uploads. Zero sign-up. Everything runs in your browser.
Start OCR — free