Free OCR online
The free OCR that gets the words out of your scan.
Drop in a scanned PDF or a photo of a page. Typed or handwritten, in any of 82 languages. Seconds later, the words are yours: to paste, to edit, or to search inside the original. No sign-up. No watermark. Nothing kept.
- Free, 20 a day
- Files up to 100 MB
- Print & handwriting
- Read in memory, then forgotten
What do you want back?
Everything a scan should have come with
Four ways out
Plain text you can paste, an editable Word .docx, the original PDF made searchable so Ctrl-F works, or detected tables as an .xlsx spreadsheet. Free, no watermark, no sign-up on any of the four.
Generous where others gate
Most free tools cap you at 15 MB and a couple of tasks a day, then ask you to sign in. This one takes files up to 100 MB, twenty times a day, no account. And with a FormsPal subscription, the caps come off entirely.
Fast, then forgotten
A modern neural engine reads a page in seconds, holds it in memory just long enough to answer, and forgets it. Nothing hits a disk.
Reads what other free tools skip
Handwriting, not just type
The neural engine reads clean print and looser handwriting in the same pass: a filled-in form field, a signature line, a note in the margin. Nothing extra to switch on.
Eighty-two languages
Eighty-two languages across more than a dozen scripts, from English and Spanish to Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, and Amharic. Each read by the recognition model tuned for it.
Searchable in any script
The searchable-PDF text layer now carries full Unicode, so a Chinese or Arabic page comes back findable and copyable. Ctrl-F works on every language, not only the Latin ones.
Better than the tool you were about to use
| Feature | FormsPal OCR | Most free OCR tools |
|---|---|---|
| Sign in to download | Never | Often required |
| Free file size | Up to 100 MB | Often 5 to 15 MB |
| Free conversions | 20 a day | Two or three, or paid |
| Watermark on your file | None, ever | Common on Word and PDF |
| Your document afterward | Read in memory, then gone | Uploaded and kept |
| Text, Word, and searchable PDF | All free | Often behind a paywall |
| Handwriting | Read too | Rarely, or garbled |
| Languages | 82, incl. Indic & CJK | Latin scripts, usually |
Compared against the free tiers of the widely used online OCR tools, mid 2026. Their limits change; ours are on this page.
In short: processed and forgotten.
- Your file is processed in memory and immediately discarded
- Nothing is written to disk, ever
- No cookies, no trackers, no account
- Logs carry timings and byte counts, never content or filenames
How we handle documents across FormsPal: the Trust Center.
What is OCR?
OCR stands for optical character recognition: software that looks at the pixels of a scanned page or photo, finds the letters, and turns them into real text your computer can edit and search. A scan without OCR is just a picture. After OCR it behaves like a document.
This free OCR online tool runs a modern neural engine, the same one behind the FormsPal document apps. It reads a typical page in seconds, and straightens a page you shot at an angle before reading it, so a quick phone snap works about as well as a flatbed scan. It reads printed and handwritten text across 82 languages, spanning Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, CJK, the Indic family, Ethiopic, and Southeast Asian scripts. Ask for a searchable PDF and the text layer carries full Unicode, so every one of those scripts stays findable and copyable.
How to convert an image or PDF to text
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Upload your file
Drag a PDF or a photo onto the box above, or click to choose one. Files up to 100 MB, and drop several to get them back as one zip.
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Choose what you want back
Plain text to paste, an editable Word .docx, a searchable PDF, or an Excel sheet of any detected tables. Pick one output, or several.
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Download
The words come back in seconds. Your file is read in memory and immediately forgotten. No account, no watermark, nothing stored.
OCR in 82 languages
The same free OCR reads printed and handwritten text in 82 languages across more than a dozen writing systems. Ask for a searchable PDF and every script stays findable and copyable, not just the Latin ones.
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Latin & European 30
English, Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Welsh
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Cyrillic 9
russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Kazakh, Tatar, Mongolian
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Middle Eastern & Central Asian 10
Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Uyghur, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek
Right-to-left scripts read in logical order and stay searchable in the PDF text layer.
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South Asian 14
Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, Nepali, Sinhala, Sanskrit
Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, and the wider Indic family, each read by the engine tuned for it.
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Southeast Asian 7
Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Khmer, Burmese, Lao
Includes the complex Khmer, Burmese, and Lao scripts.
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East Asian 4
Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean
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African 5
Swahili, Afrikaans, Amharic, Tigrinya, Yoruba
Amharic and Tigrinya in the Ethiopic script.
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Caucasus & Greek 3
Armenian, Georgian, Greek
Questions people ask
Is this OCR tool really free?
Yes. 20 conversions a day, up to 100 MB and 10 pages per file, no sign-up and no watermark. It runs on the same OCR engine as the paid FormsPal apps, free to use here. With a FormsPal subscription, the caps come off.
Are my documents stored anywhere?
No. Your file is processed in memory and immediately forgotten. Nothing is written to disk, no cookies are set, and our logs contain timings and byte counts, never content or filenames.
Can I OCR a photo taken with my phone?
Yes, JPG and PNG photos work well. For a full scanning workflow on your phone, with batch capture and quality checks, the FormsPal scanner app does this natively.
Can it read handwriting?
Yes. The recognition model reads printed and handwritten text in the same pass, so filled-in forms, signatures, and margin notes come through. Neat handwriting reads best; heavy cursive is harder, as it is for any OCR.
Which languages are supported?
Eighty-two, across more than a dozen scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, CJK, the Indic family, Ethiopic, and Southeast Asian. They include English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Amharic, Khmer, and Thai. Ask for a searchable PDF and the text layer keeps every one of those scripts findable, not just the Latin ones.
What happens when I hit a limit?
Two limits keep the free tool fast for everyone: 20 conversions a day, and 10 pages per file (up to 100 MB each). Reach the daily count and you get a clear message; it resets at midnight UTC, so come back the next day. Have a file over 10 pages? Split it and convert the parts. With a FormsPal subscription, the caps come off. Questions: support@formspal.com.
How do I convert a scanned PDF to editable Word?
Upload the scanned PDF, choose the Word (.docx) output, and download. The OCR reads the page images and rebuilds them as real, editable text, so the file opens in Word or Pages ready to edit, not as a picture of a page.
Can I turn a picture of a table into an Excel spreadsheet?
Yes. Choose the Excel output and any detected tables come back as an .xlsx with rows and columns intact, ready to sort and total. It works on scanned tables and photos of tables alike.
What file formats can I convert?
Inputs are PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, and WebP, up to 100 MB. Outputs are plain text, an editable Word .docx, a searchable PDF, or an Excel .xlsx of detected tables. Any output works from the same upload.
How accurate is the OCR?
On clean printed text it is very accurate. Accuracy drops with blur, low light, skew, or heavy cursive, so a flat, well-lit shot that fills the frame reads best. The result flags low-confidence text so you know when to check it.
The words are in there. Go get them.
Try FormsPal OCR, freeNo sign-up. No watermark. 20 a day on the house.