Read a document without sending the document
Local OCR is a Documents job that happens to use a model. The product question is “can I get text and a searchable PDF without an upload queue?” — not “which cloud model is smartest”.
Reviewed 17 September 2026
What it is for
- Screenshots and phone photos of signs, slides, chats.
- Receipts and invoices — with the caveat that totals are the first thing to re-check.
- Scanned PDFs that have no real text layer, exported as searchable PDF.
- Native-text PDFs, where embedded text can be reused until you Force OCR.
Languages
Shipped recognition packs: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese. You choose a language before running. Auto does not detect script; it falls back to English. If you leave Auto on a Chinese scan, expect English-biased garbage rather than magic.
Privacy and limits
Recognition runs in the tab after you start it. Runtime assets load from this origin, not from a third-party OCR API. Encrypted PDFs are rejected; we do not bypass passwords.
Accuracy drops on heavy JPEG compression, skewed pages, tiny UI type, handwriting, and mixed receipts. We do not advertise a single accuracy percentage.
Searchable PDF overlay uses Tesseract word boxes. CJK export needs the bundled font. Force OCR on a digital PDF may stack an OCR layer on top of the original text layer — that limitation is disclosed in the tool.
Related
Open Local OCR · Image to text without uploading · Searchable scanned PDFs · Receipt OCR failure modes · Methodology.