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OCR & Smart Extract

AI
Turn scans into searchable, structured data.
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What you'll get: a searchable, copyable PDF — scanned pages run through OCR with the original layout preserved as an invisible text layer behind the image. For another use, try AI · Make Searchable.

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Private & secure
AI tools process your PDF in memory, send only the extracted text to the model, and discard everything immediately. No file is persisted on our servers.
No watermarks
Clean output, no branding, no daily limits.
Pay only for what you use
Purchased credits never expire. Cancel anytime.

Why people use AI OCR

PDFs come in two flavors: text-bearing (selectable, searchable, copy-paste-able) and image-only (a scanned or photographed document where the “text” is just pixels). AI OCR converts the second kind into the first — searchable text behind every page so the rest of the catalog (search, translate, summarize) can work on the content.

Scanned document indexing
10 years of filed paperwork that got scanned to PDF without OCR. Run OCR on the batch, get searchable archives. Suddenly Ctrl+F works.
Phone-photographed receipts → text
Receipts shot with a phone camera land as image-only PDFs. OCR them so expense-report tools can extract amounts/dates without manual transcription.
Old filing-cabinet digitization
Legal binders, medical records, family archives that were scanned years ago. OCR makes them searchable + screen-reader accessible — basic accessibility win.
Compliance / audit prep
Auditors expect every document in scope to be searchable. OCR scanned production documents before the audit kickoff so reviewers can keyword-search rather than page-flip.
Pipeline preparation
Translation / summarization / Chat-with-PDF tools all need text-bearing input. OCR is the gateway op for image-only PDFs entering any downstream AI pipeline.

How AI OCR works

Three steps. Sign in to run, zero retention — files never persisted on our servers.

  1. STEP 1
    Drop your image-only PDF
    Up to 100 MB. Detects whether OCR is actually needed — if the PDF already has selectable text, OCR is skipped (no credits charged).
  2. STEP 2
    We render + recognize each page
    Server-side rasterization at OCR-friendly DPI, then a text-recognition pass per page. Output is a fresh PDF with the original images preserved + a hidden text layer behind each page that aligns word-by-word with the visible text.
  3. STEP 3
    Get a searchable PDF back
    Visually identical to the input, but Ctrl+F works, screen readers can read it, and downstream tools (Translate, Summarize, Chat with PDF) can ingest it normally.

What makes pdfcraft ai different

  • Citations on every claim
    Every AI summary, answer, and translation links back to the page it came from. You can verify the source before relying on the output. Hallucination is bounded, not blind.
  • Pay only for what you use
    No subscription. Purchased credits never expire. Cancel anytime. Cost shown before you run — exact credit amount appears after upload.
  • Multi-provider routing, no vendor lock-in
    We balance multiple AI providers per call to optimise cost and quality. If one has an outage, the next call automatically tries another. You're not bound to a single vendor's pricing or downtime.
  • Zero retention by design
    Your PDF lives in memory only as long as the AI call needs it, then it's discarded — nothing is persisted to our servers. We don't fine-tune models on your data. Verifiable in your dashboard's audit log.
  • Honest about model limits
    When a doc exceeds the model's context window we surface that the output was truncated (we render result.wasTruncated in every AI tool's UI). When a number can't be verified from the source we flag it. No silent failures.

Frequently asked questions

How accurate is the OCR?
Depends heavily on input quality. Clean scans at 300+ DPI: 99%+ word accuracy. Phone photographs in poor lighting: 90–95%. Faded carbon-copy receipts: 80–90%. The output preserves the recognized text as a hidden layer; verify before trusting for high-stakes use (legal, medical, financial transcription).
Does it handle handwriting?
Limited — printed text only is the reliable case. Block-letter handwriting works in clean scans. Cursive or hurried handwriting recognition is unreliable. For dedicated handwriting recognition, specialized HTR (handwritten text recognition) tools outperform general OCR.
What languages are supported?
50+ languages including Latin, Cyrillic, CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), Arabic, Hindi/Devanagari. Source language auto-detected. Mixed-language documents typically work but accuracy drops at language boundaries.
What's the difference between AI OCR and AI Searchable PDF?
Same backend. AI Searchable PDF is the same output presented with a different SEO landing — both produce the same searchable-PDF output. The variant exists for landing-page distinctness; pick whichever name matches what you searched for.
What's the credit cost?
5 credits per document. Cost is per-document, not per-page (fixed regardless of length).
Does it preserve the visual look?
Yes — the original page images are kept verbatim. The text layer is invisible (behind the image). Print the output and it looks the same as the input. The only difference is what tools can do with it.

Need to extract the text only?

After OCR, run PDF to Text to get a clean .txt file with the recognized content — useful for pipelines, search indexing, or pasting into other apps.

Try PDF to Text

Related PDF tools

Other tools in the AI category — built on the same private, in-browser pipeline.

Use cases for this tool

Step-by-step workflows that put this tool to work.

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