How to Extract Text from a PDF (With & Without OCR)

Extracting text from a PDF is useful for searching, copying content, or processing the data programmatically.

Text-based PDFs have selectable text built in. Scanned PDFs are images — they require OCR to extract text.

For text-based PDFs: Use Doclair's PDF to Text tool. Upload your PDF, click Convert, and download the extracted text.

For scanned PDFs: Use Doclair's OCR PDF tool. It uses Tesseract.js — an open-source OCR engine running in your browser.

Step 1: Identify your PDF type. Try selecting text in the PDF viewer — if you can select individual words, it's text-based.

Step 2: Choose the right tool — PDF to Text for native PDFs, OCR PDF for scanned documents.

Step 3: Upload your file and process it.

Step 4: Download the extracted text or copy it directly.

How accurate is OCR? For clearly scanned documents in English, accuracy is typically 95–99%.

What languages does OCR support? Doclair's OCR supports 100+ languages via Tesseract.js.