OCR PDF
Extract the text of a scanned PDF so you can search it, copy it and paste it somewhere else.
Free · No account needed · Your file is never stored
Files are processed in memory and never stored on our servers.
Your document
Reading your document
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We could not do that
Text extracted successfully.
Want to know what this contract actually commits you to?
How it works
Upload
Drop in your file — nothing is stored on our servers.
We process it
Extract the text of a scanned PDF so you can search it, copy it and paste it somewhere else.
Download and analyze
Take the result, then find out what the document actually commits you to.
Why use LegalValidate for ocr pdf
Reads what the scanner could not
Pages with no text layer are recognised and their words returned, so a scan stops being a picture.
Three languages
English, Russian and Uzbek, chosen explicitly — a Cyrillic contract read as English comes back as nonsense.
Skips what it does not need to
Pages that already carry text are read directly, which is faster and more accurate than re-recognising them.
Tells you what it could not read
If pages came back empty, the result says how many — no silent gaps in the middle of a contract.
When you need this
- You need to search a scanned agreement for the word "termination".
- A clause has to be quoted in an email and retyping it is not an option.
- The text of an old paper contract needs to go into a template.
- You want to compare two versions of a scanned document.
What this tool will not do
- Up to 30 pages per document — recognition is expensive, and this is a free endpoint.
- Handwriting is not reliably recognised, and a handwritten amendment is exactly the part you should not let software guess at.
- It returns the text, not a document. If you want the scan itself to become searchable, use Make PDF Searchable instead.
- Accuracy depends on the scan: 300 DPI and a flat page beat any setting here.
OCR PDF — questions
What is the difference from Make PDF Searchable? +
This gives you the text. That gives you the document back with the text written into it, so it can then be searched, converted and reviewed. Different jobs.
Which languages are supported? +
English, Russian and Uzbek, plus a combined English-and-Russian mode for mixed documents. Pick the one the contract is written in.
Why is some text missing? +
Usually low scan quality, a page at an angle, or handwriting. The result tells you how many pages could not be read rather than hiding it.
Is the document a contract?
The same file can be read against six criteria — clarity, risk protection, enforceability, balance of terms, structure and overall exposure — free and without an account.
Need to do more than one thing to this document?
Open it in the document workspace instead: upload once, then reorder, rotate, delete, merge and compress without sending the file again.
Open the document workspace