Scanned PDF to Text

1. Drop the PDF into the box above. Files up to 25 MB are accepted, and up to ten files can go in one job.
2. If the PDF is password-protected, type the password when asked. It is unlocked in your browser and the password never leaves your device.
3. The pages are counted before anything uploads, so you see the price first. Your three free pages for the day start straight away; more pages wait for you to add credits.
4. Each page comes back in order, labelled with its page number and a confidence mark. Copy the text, or download plain text or Markdown free, or a Word document or spreadsheet for 3 credits.

A scanned page costs 1 credit ($0.05) once the free pages are used, so a 20-page scan read in one go is 17 credits, about $0.85. A job reads up to 40 pages; run a longer document in parts.

Open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If the text highlights, the file has a text layer: the characters are in there and nothing needs to be recognised. If you get a blue box over the whole page, it is a scan.

Both work here, and the file is checked automatically. A text layer is extracted directly, which is exact — every character as the author typed it, no recognition step, no errors to check, and no credits. A scan goes through the reader page by page, and each of those pages is a page you pay for once your free three are gone.

The practical difference is what you should verify afterwards. With an extracted text layer, the only oddities are layout artefacts: a header repeated on every page, hyphens at old line breaks, footnote numbers landing mid-sentence. With a scan, check the numbers and the names.

Mixed files are common — a contract typed in Word with a signed page scanned back in. A PDF is extracted for free only when every page carries its own text. If even one page is a scan, the whole file is read from the images, page by page, so nothing is silently left out, and every page counts as a scanned page.

A password-protected PDF asks for its password before anything is uploaded. It is unlocked in your browser, so the password never leaves your device; nothing is charged for a file that could not be read.

• Garbled text from a PDF that was "free". Some scanners add their own hidden text layer, and when it is poor, it is that layer you get back. Switch "Read as" to tables and run it again: in table mode every page is read from the image instead. That costs 1 credit a page.
• "That PDF could not be opened." The file is damaged or was not saved completely. Export it again from the scanner software, or save its pages as JPG images and upload those.
• Faint or crooked pages. Fax-quality scans, pages fed in at an angle and pale photocopies lose small print first. Rescan at 300 dpi, square on the glass, and run that page on its own.
• More than 40 pages. Only the first 40 are read in one job, and the rest are listed as unread. Upload the remainder as a second job.
• Handwritten notes in the margin. Switch on "Read handwriting" so they are read carefully, with [illegible] where a word cannot be made out.

Upload a picture of a page and the text appears below it, in the order a person would read it. That covers a photo of a book, a screenshot of an app that will not let you select text, a scanned contract, a whiteboard after a meeting, and a page of your own handwriting.

Each page comes back separately, with a confidence mark, so on a batch you can see which page needs a second look.

Nothing you upload becomes a public page. The file is deleted as soon as the job finishes, and the text stays attached to your job for you to copy or download.

Reliable: printed pages, receipts, forms, screenshots, slides, book pages photographed flat, and neat handwriting in the writer's usual hand.

Usually fine: cursive that a stranger could read, a whiteboard photographed square-on, a scan with a coffee ring on it, and mixed pages where a table sits in the middle of prose.

Genuinely hard, and it will say so rather than invent an answer: personal shorthand, faded thermal receipts, text at a steep angle, dense small-type columns, and anything photographed while moving.

Unreadable words come back as [illegible]. That marker is the point: a reader who cannot tell which words were guessed has to check every one.

Accuracy is decided before you upload anything, by how the picture was taken. Four things matter, in this order.

1. Fill the frame with the page. Text that is 40 pixels tall reads perfectly; text that is 8 pixels tall does not, whatever the megapixel count of the camera.
2. Shoot square-on. A page photographed from an angle has converging lines and uneven focus, and the far end of every line is the part that fails.
3. Find even light. One window beats one lamp; a shadow across the middle of a page costs you that band of text. Turn the flash off.
4. Hold still, or rest the phone on something. Motion blur cannot be recovered by any reader.

There is no step five. Resolution beyond about 2000 pixels on the long edge adds upload time and nothing else, which is why oversized images are scaled down here before they are read.

Switch "Read as" to tables and every grid on the page comes back as rows and columns instead of a run of words. That is the difference between retyping a supplier list and downloading it, and it is why the spreadsheet export exists: one sheet per table, with numbers stored as numbers so a column of prices adds up without being cleaned first. When the table is the whole point, Image to Excel is built for exactly that and adds a CSV download.

Screenshots are the easiest input there is, because the text was rendered rather than photographed. Error messages, chat threads, dashboards and anything inside an app that blocks copying all read cleanly.

PDFs are handled two ways. A PDF exported from Word, Pages or a website already contains its text, so it is pulled straight out of the file — no model involved, the result is exact rather than approximate, and those pages are free because nothing had to be recognised. A PDF that is really a scan is read page by page like any other image, and charged like one. You do not have to know which kind you have; the file is checked and the cheaper path is taken automatically.

Three pages a day, across up to three uploads, cost nothing. You see the text, the tables and the confidence marks, and you can copy all of it. There is no account and no email.

Upload more pages than your allowance covers and the pages inside it are read in full, the rest are listed as unread, and the result says exactly where it stopped. Nothing is charged. On a scanned PDF, only the pages you are entitled to are ever sent to be read, so a preview costs the same whether the file has four pages or four hundred.

Beyond that it is 1 credit for each page that has to be recognised. Credits are bought once, never expire, and work across every tool here: a 30-page scanned report costs 30 credits, roughly $1.30 from the middle pack. The Word and spreadsheet downloads cost 3 credits each, once per job — re-downloading the same file later is free.

A PDF that already carries its own text is the exception. Extracting it costs nothing on our side, so it costs nothing on yours: up to 40 pages a job, free, without touching your daily allowance.

Read the numbers first. Text errors are obvious on sight; a transposed digit in a total or a date is not, and those are exactly the values people copy without looking. Then check proper nouns, which have no context to be corrected from, and anything you intend to quote.

That is a minute of work per page — the same minute a data-entry service builds into its price. What you are buying here is the retyping, not the checking.