Is there a page or daily limit?

No. Because OCR runs on your device rather than on a paid server, there is nothing to meter. Long documents simply take a little longer.

Is my scan uploaded for processing?

No. The recognition engine runs inside your browser. Your document never reaches a server.

On clean scans at 300 DPI with the correct language selected, accuracy is very high. Skewed, low-resolution or handwritten content reduces it — OCR works on printed text.

Does it work offline?

After the language model has been downloaded once, recognition itself runs locally — Haven PDF is an offline-capable web app.

Home › OCR a PDF — Free and Without Uploading

● Files are never uploaded

OCR a PDF — Free and Without Uploading

A scanned PDF is just a stack of photos: you cannot search it, and you cannot copy a single line out of it. OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that by recognizing the text in the scan and embedding it as a selectable, searchable layer.

Most free OCR sites upload your scan to their servers and cap you at a few pages per day. Haven PDF runs OCR entirely in your browser — the recognition model downloads to your device and processes the file locally, in 31 languages, with no page limits and no account.

Open the tool →

How to

Open the OCR tool. Free, in your browser — no sign-up, no page limits.
Add the scanned PDF. It is processed locally; nothing is uploaded.
Pick the language. Choose from 31 languages for the best accuracy.
Run OCR and download. The result is the same PDF — now searchable and copyable.

What you get after OCR

The page still looks like the original scan, but there is now an invisible text layer underneath: Ctrl+F finds words, text selects and copies cleanly, and screen readers can finally read the document. You can also export the recognized text on its own with the PDF-to-text tool.

31 languages, picked by you

Choose the document’s language before running recognition — Turkish, English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and more. Picking the right language dramatically improves accuracy on accented characters and non-Latin scripts.

Local OCR is private OCR

Scans that need OCR are often contracts, certificates, IDs or medical results. Uploading those to a free OCR site means trusting an unknown server with them. Here, the OCR engine (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly) runs on your machine — the scan never leaves it.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a page or daily limit?: No. Because OCR runs on your device rather than on a paid server, there is nothing to meter. Long documents simply take a little longer.
Is my scan uploaded for processing?: No. The recognition engine runs inside your browser. Your document never reaches a server.
How accurate is it?: On clean scans at 300 DPI with the correct language selected, accuracy is very high. Skewed, low-resolution or handwritten content reduces it — OCR works on printed text.
Does it work offline?: After the language model has been downloaded once, recognition itself runs locally — Haven PDF is an offline-capable web app.