How to Convert Scanned PDFs and Images to Editable Text

When a document is faxed, scanned with a physical scanner, or copy-protected using flat canvas pages, it essentially becomes a collection of photographs. The original text formatting is lost, and standard PDF readers cannot find or highlight the text. To retrieve the characters, we need Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. We can do this entirely client-side without sending files to server systems.

In-Browser Neural OCR (WebAssembly)

In the past, running OCR meant installing gigabytes of software or uploading documents to cloud APIs (which poses data compliance risks). Today, we can run modern neural network models directly inside the browser using WebAssembly.

iCreatePDF compiles a browser-version of the Tesseract OCR engine. It renders your PDF pages to image canvas buffers, feeds the frames to the WebAssembly worker thread, checks letters against dictionary databases, and compiles them into clean, copyable unicode text.

Steps to Extract Text from Scanned PDF

1. Visit the PDF OCR (Scan to Text) tool page.
2. Select and upload your scanned, non-copyable PDF file.
3. Choose your Document Language. We support:
   • English (eng)
   • Spanish (spa)
   • Tamil (tam)
   • Hindi (hin)
4. Click Run OCR Text Extraction. The script will render pages, load the language file, and process character recognition.
5. Copy the resulting text directly to your clipboard or click Download Plain Text (.txt) to save it.

Maximizing OCR Accuracy

OCR accuracy depends heavily on document readability. For best results:

• Ensure the scanned document is upright (rotate pages first if they are sideways).
• High-resolution scans yield better text detection; avoid low-quality faxes if possible.
• Match the primary document language in the selector to prevent dictionary parsing mismatches.