What it does
ActuallyFreeTools’s OCR turns scanned PDFs and photos of documents into searchable PDFs and plain text for free, with no page limit. It reads 23 languages including English, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, French and Chinese, using the open-source Tesseract engine running in your browser. The output PDF looks identical but its text can be searched, selected and copied.
How to use it
- Drop a scanned PDF or photos of pages.
- Choose the document’s language (or two languages).
- Recognise, then download the searchable PDF or the text.
Questions people ask
How accurate is it?
Very good on clean printed text; weaker on handwriting, tiny print, or blurry and skewed photos. Use Document scanner first to straighten photos, and check names and numbers.
Which languages are supported?
English, Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Hindi, Urdu, Persian, Bengali, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese and Korean.
Why does the first run take longer?
The OCR engine and language data (a few MB) download once, then are cached by your browser.
Is OCR — scan to text on ActuallyFreeTools really free?
Yes. There is no sign-up, no daily limit, no watermark and no paid tier. Nothing is held back for paying users.
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. OCR — scan to text runs inside your browser, so your files are processed on your own device and never sent to a server. That is also why there is nothing to meter or charge for.
Related tools
Last updated 30 October 2026. ActuallyFreeTools tools run entirely in your browser.