How to Read Text from a Scanned PDF

Published: Oct 19, 2026 | Updated: Oct 19, 2026 | About (Japanese)

Key points

Choose the PDF
Set the pages
Copy the text

A scanned PDF is a picture rather than text, so its text cannot be copied as it is.

Steps

Choose the PDF in Read Text from Images and PDFs (OCR).
Set "Maximum PDF pages to read".
Press "Read the text". The text appears page by page.

If the PDF has selectable text, Extract Text from PDF is more accurate and faster.

Use "Read Text from Images and PDFs (OCR)" (free)

Tools that go well with this

Extract Text from PDF: Pull the text out of a PDF to copy or save.
Character Counter (for Applications and Reports): Count characters, lines and manuscript sheets of your text.
Remove and Tidy Line Breaks in Text: Tidy line breaks in text copied from PDFs and elsewhere.

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