Prompt
What should I use to convert scanned PDFs to text?
Latest observation
Oct 11, 2026
OpenAI APIWeb search: off
If your PDFs are scanned images (not real text), you need OCR (optical character recognition).
Good options:
- Adobe Acrobat Pro – easy and accurate for many scans
- ABBYY FineReader – one of the best for quality OCR
- Tesseract OCR – free, open source, good if you’re comfortable with command line
- Google Drive / Google Docs OCR – simple free option for small jobs
- Microsoft OneNote – can extract text from pasted images/PDF pages
- Online OCR tools – convenient, but avoid them for sensitive documents
If you want a quick recommendation:
- Best quality: ABBYY FineReader
- Best free: Tesseract
- Easiest all-around: Adobe Acrobat Pro
If you want, I can also suggest the best tool based on:
- your operating system,
- whether you need batch processing,
- and whether the PDFs are handwritten or typed.