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PDF2OCR - Convert Images/PDF into text Using OCR Technology

By Rishabh Bhardwaj • Updated • 2 min read

Get it for Linux
sudo snap install pdf2go

OCR is the feature that most deserves to stay off the internet. Scanned contracts, payslips and ID documents are exactly what you should not be uploading to a free web converter, and yet that is how most people do it because the alternative was never made easy. PDF2OCR does the recognition on your own machine.

It reads images and PDFs of any length, from a single photographed page to a long scanned document, and the text comes out ready to search, copy, export or translate. You can point it at a file on disk or at a URL.

It is not glamorous work. But the difference between a scan and a document you can actually search is the difference between a pile of paper and an archive.

Rishabh Bhardwaj Written by Rishabh Bhardwaj

PDF2OCR is a free Linux desktop application that turns PDF documents, scanned PDFs and image files into editable plain text using Tesseract OCR. Scanned contracts, invoices, receipts, books, screenshots and photographs all become text you can search, copy and edit.

What PDF2OCR does

  • Extract text from scanned PDFs and images using Tesseract optical character recognition.
  • Wide format support — PDF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, GIF, WebP and more.
  • Single or multiple images converted to text in one pass.
  • Unlimited page count — a long PDF is not a problem.
  • Open from disk or from a URL — process a document without downloading it by hand first.
  • Export to plain text as a .txt file.
  • Translate the extracted text into other languages.
  • Built-in caching so repeated work loads faster.

Installing PDF2OCR on Linux

PDF2OCR is published on the Snap Store under the name pdf2go: 

sudo snap install pdf2go

Then run it with:

pdf2go

When OCR is the right tool

A PDF comes in two kinds. One is text that happens to be in a PDF wrapper — you can already select and copy it. The other is a picture of text: a scan, a photograph of a page, a fax that has been through three systems. Nothing in that second kind is text as far as your computer is concerned, and no amount of copying will get it out.

OCR is what bridges the two. PDF2OCR reads the picture, recognises the characters in it, and hands you something you can actually edit — which is the difference between retyping a twelve-page contract and not.

Frequently asked questions

Which file types can it read?

PDF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, GIF, WebP and many other image formats.

Is there a page limit?

No. PDFs with any number of pages can be processed.

Can it translate the text it finds?

Yes — extracted text can be translated into multiple languages inside the app.

Can it process a file from a URL?

Yes. PDF2OCR can fetch and process a PDF or image directly from a link rather than requiring you to download it first.

Is PDF2OCR free?

Yes — completely free. There is no Pro tier, no page limit and no feature held back behind a payment. Install it and use it.

Related write-ups

For the opposite job — turning images into a PDF rather than a PDF into text — see JPEG2PDF.

Topics

OCRPDF toolsText extractionOffline processingTranslationLinux desktop

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