What OCR does — and when you need it
OCR (optical character recognition) turns a picture of text back into actual text. A screenshot, a photo of a page, or a scanned PDF looks readable to you, but to a computer it's just pixels — you can't select a sentence, search for a word, or paste it into a document. OCR reads those pixels and reconstructs the characters, so you get text you can copy, edit, and feed into anything else. It's the missing step whenever the words you need are trapped inside an image.
How it works here
This tool runs Tesseract, a mature open-source OCR engine, compiled to WebAssembly so it executes inside your browser. Images go straight to the engine; PDFs are rendered page-by-page and each page is read in turn. Because it all happens on your own machine, there's no upload and no server — the file, and the text pulled out of it, stay with you. Pick the document's language first (that's what tells the engine which character set to expect), drop the file in, and copy or download the result as a .txt.
Getting the best accuracy
OCR quality is mostly decided by the input, so a little care pays off. High-contrast, straight, well-lit scans read best — black text on a white background at a decent resolution. Accuracy drops on low-resolution photos, skewed or curled pages, busy backgrounds, decorative fonts, and especially handwriting, which general OCR handles poorly. If a result comes back messy, the fix is almost always a better capture: rescan at 300 DPI, straighten the page, and improve the lighting rather than the settings. Choosing the correct language (or the Korean+English combo for mixed documents) also makes a real difference.
Straight into your AI workflow
OCR pairs naturally with the rest of BreezeConvert. Once you've turned a scanned report into text here, you can drop it into the Markdown tool to clean it up, count the tokens, and prep it for Claude or ChatGPT — all without the original ever touching a server. It's also the honest answer to the one thing our PDF-to-DXF and Markdown tools can't do: read a scanned document that has no real text inside it.
Your document stays on your device
The pages people most need to OCR — a contract, an ID, a medical form, a page from a private notebook — are exactly the ones that shouldn't be uploaded to an unknown OCR website. Here they aren't: the recognition runs entirely in your browser, and nothing is transmitted. If you'd like to confirm that before trusting it with something sensitive, the verify-it-yourself page shows you how, and you can even run it with your network switched off.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image or PDF uploaded?
No. The OCR runs entirely in your browser using a WebAssembly build of Tesseract. The file never leaves your device.
Which languages are supported?
English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian, plus a Korean+English mode for mixed documents. Choose the language before extracting.
Why is the first run slow?
The language pack (a few MB) downloads the first time you use a given language, then is cached for the rest of your session. Larger PDFs also take longer because every page is read individually.
The text came out wrong — why?
OCR accuracy depends on the input. Low-resolution photos, skewed pages, unusual fonts and handwriting all reduce accuracy. A cleaner, straighter, higher-contrast scan is the best fix.