OCR: extract text from a scanned PDF without uploading it

OCR (optical character recognition) turns an image of text into real, editable and copyable text.

Local OCR with Tesseract.js

IWELAH uses Tesseract.js, an open-source library that runs entirely in your browser. No file is sent to any server. The language model is downloaded once and cached.

When to use local OCR?

For printed documents, scanned invoices or digitized books. Accuracy is usually excellent on good-quality scans.

What about handwriting?

For handwriting, an AI vision model (GPT-4o) gives better results. That is the Manuscript OCR (AI) tool, which processes your pages on our servers and then at OpenAI.