Extract handwritten text from scanned PDF documents. Free browser OCR.
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DoctorDocs offers 244 free OCR and document tools — all running privately in your browser.
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⭐ Leave a review on G2When you scan a paper document, the scanner creates an image of each page and wraps those images inside a PDF container. Unlike a digitally-created PDF (where text is stored as searchable characters), a scanned PDF contains only pixel data — essentially photographs of text. You cannot select, search, or copy text from a scanned PDF because the computer does not know that the pixels represent letters. This is where OCR comes in: it analyzes the pixel patterns on each page image and converts them back into readable, selectable text.
DoctorDocs uses a sophisticated two-stage pipeline to extract text from scanned PDFs. In the first stage, we use Mozilla's PDF.js library to render each PDF page as a high-resolution image (typically 300 DPI). PDF.js runs entirely in your browser and handles all standard PDF features including embedded fonts, compression, and encryption. In the second stage, each rendered page image is fed through our OCR engine. For digitally-created PDFs that already contain selectable text, we skip the OCR step entirely and extract the text directly using PDF.js's built-in text layer — this is faster and 100% accurate since we are reading the original text data.
Real-world PDFs often contain complex layouts with multiple columns, headers, footers, tables, and mixed text-and-image regions. Our OCR engine uses Tesseract's page segmentation modes to detect and handle these layouts. The AUTO mode analyzes the page structure before recognition begins, identifying text blocks, columns, and table cells. For invoices and lab reports with tabular data, the engine preserves spatial relationships between cells so that values remain aligned with their labels. After extraction, our noise-filtering algorithm removes common OCR artifacts like stray characters, broken words, and misread punctuation.
Many PDFs contain sensitive information — financial statements, medical records, legal contracts, tax documents. Unlike competing services that upload your files to remote servers (often with vague data retention policies), DoctorDocs processes standard PDFs entirely within your browser. The PDF file and all extracted text exist only in your device's memory. When you close the browser tab, the data is gone. For advanced processing features that require server-side AI, we use encrypted API calls with zero data retention — your document is processed and immediately discarded from server memory.
Switching from another PDF tool? See how DoctorDocs compares:
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