OCR Extract Text Only

Extract plain text from a scanned PDF — runs OCR server-side, then pulls the recognised text out as a .txt file (no PDF output).

1. Upload your file

How does the OCR Extract Text Only work?

Get the recognised text out of a scanned PDF as a plain .txt file — no searchable PDF, just the text content. The tool chains the existing OCR pipeline (server-side OCRmyPDF / Tesseract) with client-side text extraction: scan goes to the server, OCR'd PDF comes back, text is pulled locally and returned as a .txt download. Useful when you only need the words (data extraction, search indexing, importing into another tool) and don't want to keep the OCR'd PDF around. For the searchable-PDF version, use OCR PDF (slug ocr-pdf).

🔒 Security & Privacy

Files are encrypted in transit and processed on a secure server. Your file is automatically deleted right after you download — we never store your documents.

📱 Use it on any device

Works in any modern browser — Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android, and tablets. No installation, no app to download. Just open the page and start.

⚡ Quick & easy

Drag, drop, click. Most files process in seconds, not minutes. No watermarks added to your output, no per-day limits, and the tool always shows the result before asking you to download.

🎁 Always free, no signup

Free to use, every time. No account creation, no email required, no “trial” that converts to a paid plan. We make money from ads so you don’t have to pay.

Frequently asked

OCR PDF returns the original-looking PDF with an invisible searchable text layer. This tool returns just the recognised text as a .txt — useful for downstream programmatic processing.

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