PDF to Text
Every page read, not just the first. No account, no email.
Drop a PDF to read it
PDF — up to 3 MB. Your file is read on our servers in Frankfurt and deleted within the hour.
VisionParse extracts text from scanned PDFs free in your browser, reading every page rather than only the first.
Each page is rasterised at 150 DPI and recognised separately, then joined in page order. A five-page PDF completed in 3.64 seconds in our 2026-08-01 measurement. Uploaded files are deleted one hour after conversion.
What this tool does, in numbers.
- SPEED
VisionParse read a five-page PDF in 3.64 seconds, including 1.03 seconds of rasterisation.
- ACCURACY
VisionParse rasterises PDF pages at 150 DPI, the lowest resolution that held 100% accuracy.
- LIMIT
The free PDF tool reads the first 3 pages; an account raises this to 200 pages per document.
- LANGUAGES
VisionParse recognises 161 languages inside PDFs, including Arabic, Sinhala and Tamil.
- ACCESS
The PDF to text tool requires no account, no email address and no payment card.
- RETENTION
VisionParse deletes free-tool PDFs one hour after conversion and never trains models on them.
Where the 3.64 s comes from.
Every figure on this page traces to a dated run on hardware we name. Nothing here is a vendor estimate.
Measured 2026-08-01
- Claim
- A five-page scanned PDF is rasterised and read in 3.64 seconds — 1.03 s rasterising, 2.61 s recognising.
- Method
- VisionParse standard recognition tier, single-threaded. Full methodology.
- Sample
- Five-page PDF built from the synthetic invoice, rasterised at 150 DPI and read page by page. n = 1 document, 5 pages.
- Measured
2026-08-01on Contabo Cloud VPS 8 — 8 vCPU AMD EPYC, 24 GB RAM, Ubuntu 24.04.4- Limitations
- Timing scales with page count and page density; a full A4 text page takes longer than this invoice. A single synthetic document per variant is a small sample and is not a substitute for a corpus. These figures describe format behaviour, not general accuracy. A 500-document corpus run is scheduled and will supersede them.
- Contact
- VisionParse@senithu.lk
What this tool gets wrong
Single-image rasterisation reads page one and stops. We found this in our own pipeline on 2026-08-01: a five-page PDF returned one page of text with no error. Silent truncation is worse than a failure because the caller cannot tell. VisionParse now rasterises every page explicitly and reports the page count it actually read.
PDFs that already contain text are still re-read optically. A born-digital PDF has a text layer that could be copied directly and perfectly. VisionParse currently recognises it as an image instead, which is slower and can introduce errors a direct copy would not.
Page order survives past page nine. Pages are sorted numerically rather than by filename, so page 10 follows page 9 instead of landing between 1 and 2 — a common failure in naive batch OCR.
Three steps, no account.
Drop your PDF
Drag a PDF onto the workbench, or choose one. Nothing leaves your device until you drop it.
Every page is rasterised
Each page is rendered at 150 DPI and recognised separately, so nothing is skipped and page order is preserved.
Take the text
Text appears page by page with a confidence score. Copy it or download a .txt; the file is deleted within the hour.
What this tool accepts.
| Property | Free tool |
|---|---|
| Input format | PDF, scanned or born-digital |
| Output | Plain text, UTF-8, joined in page order |
| Rasterisation | 150 DPI per page |
| Maximum pages, free tool | 3 |
| Maximum pages, account | 200 per document |
| Maximum file size | 3 MB |
| Rate limit | 5 files per hour, per IP address |
| Languages | 161 |
| File retention | Deleted 1 hour after conversion |
| Processing location | Frankfurt, Germany |
When to use the API instead.
This page converts one file now. To convert files from your own software, the same engine runs over HTTP from Starter upward.
# same engine, from your code curl -X POST https://api.visionparse.app/v1/ocr \ -H "x-api-key: $VISIONPARSE_KEY" \ -F "file=@image.jpg" → 202 { "jobId": "c0df8e2c…" }
Use the API when
You convert more than a handful of files, convert on a schedule, or need results inside another system. Batch, webhooks and bounding boxes are API-only.
Frequently asked
Does this read every page of my PDF?
Yes. Every page is rasterised and recognised separately, and the result reports how many pages were read. The free tool covers the first 3 pages; an account raises that to 200 pages per document.
How long does a multi-page PDF take?
A five-page PDF took 3.64 seconds in our 2026-08-01 measurement — 1.03 seconds to rasterise and 2.61 seconds to recognise. Longer or denser documents take proportionally longer.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
Yes, that is the main case. A scanned PDF is a picture of a page, so it needs optical recognition rather than a text copy. Born-digital PDFs also work.
Can I get a searchable PDF back instead of text?
Use the scanned PDF to searchable PDF tool, which keeps the original page images and adds an invisible text layer underneath.
Do you keep my PDF?
Free-tool files are deleted one hour after conversion. Account uploads are deleted after 30 days, and no customer file is ever used to train models.