Most documents received by post and then scanned are unreadable to a computer: nothing in them can be searched. This is precisely the recognition online services keep for their paid plans, because it costs them server time.
How it works
Drop your file on the page, or click to pick it from your folders.
Start the job. It runs inside your browser: nothing is sent to a server.
Download the result. No account, no watermark, no queue.
When this really helps
Find something in a scan
Extracted text can be searched from the keyboard, unlike the image.
Reuse a letter you received
A scanned paper document becomes text to quote or correct.
Archive something usable
Years of correspondence become a searchable corpus.
What the conversion keeps, and what it loses
Working inside a browser comes with limits a hosted service does not have. Here they are in plain words, so you know what to expect before you start.
What is kept
- The text of every page, in reading order
- Accents and French punctuation
- The separation between pages
- Paragraphs, approximately
What is not carried over
- Layout, columns and tables
- Images and logos
- Fonts and styling
- Some accuracy on a poor-quality scan
Worth knowing about the format
The engine is Tesseract, compiled for the browser, with the French language data bundled in. Quality depends mostly on the scan: a clean, straight document gives an excellent result, a crooked photograph far less.
Not the right tool?
- PDF → Word — Si votre PDF contient déjà du texte, la conversion directe sera parfaite.
- Rotate a PDF — Redresser un scan de travers améliore nettement la reconnaissance.
- Compress a PDF — Les scans sont lourds : la compression les rend transmissibles.
Why it's free
Online converters receive your file on their servers, process it, then promise to delete it. Every document costs them computing time: that is why they charge, and why they cap file sizes.
Here, the work happens on your own computer. The page contains no server code: your document cannot be received, because it is never sent. So there is nothing to bill, nothing to cap, and nothing to delete afterwards. Cut your connection once the page has loaded — everything keeps working.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know whether my PDF is a scan?
Try selecting a line with the mouse in your reader. If nothing selects, it is an image: this tool is made for that.
Does recognition handle accents?
Yes, the model is specifically French: accents, cedillas and French punctuation are supported.
What if I want to correct inside the PDF itself?
Open it in the editor instead: recognition starts automatically there and every recognised line becomes editable in place, inside the document.
Other tools
Edit the text in a PDF — Fix a line that is already written, even on a scanned document. This is the feature other services charge for, and the natural starting point when you need to retouch before converting.