Free OCR: extract text from an image or scanned PDF

This page brings together the two ways to use optical character recognition (OCR) on Warizma: from a photo or scanned image, or from a PDF that's already been scanned. Either way, the same engine turns an image of text into text you can actually use — copyable, editable, searchable — rather than just a picture of letters.

Why two tools for the same technology

A book page photographed on a phone and a PDF scanned by a photocopier don't raise quite the same issues: the first brings framing, tilt and lighting problems specific to handheld photography, while the second is often already well-aligned but can run to dozens of pages, or may already be "secretly" searchable if some software already embedded a text layer. Splitting the two search intents into two pages lets each one explain what's specific to it, while sharing the same recognition engine behind the scenes.

What actually determines result quality

Contrary to popular belief, OCR quality depends first on the image you send, not on the recognition engine itself: a document that's flat, well-lit and sharp will give an excellent result even with an ordinary engine, while a blurry, crooked photo will defeat even the best engine. That's why this tool applies automatic preprocessing — deskewing, denoising, rescaling — before running recognition, and flags pages where the result stays unreliable rather than silently handing back incorrect text.

Three output formats

Every job produces plain text (copyable directly), a Word document (one paragraph per detected text block), and a searchable PDF that keeps the original image's appearance while letting you select and copy its content — handy for archiving a document while keeping it indexable by a PDF reader. The uploaded file is automatically deleted 30 minutes after processing, never logged or reused.