A normal PDF contains texts, images, links, media and various interactive elements. But a PDF image contains image only, all the original texts turn to be an image, it may be created from image files or scanned to be PDF format, users are not allowed to extract or copy any text from such a PDF image without OCR. Actually, it is not a troublesome problem to extract or copy text from PDF image today, here we have 7 solutions in following 3 parts for you, including online free options.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 
Free Download macOS 10.13 or laterHave been offering PDF solutions for years, we fairly understand our users. Most of them want to have a try on online free solutions in the beginning, but pick a dedicated program for their work in the end, because time saving and efficiency are always prior to the cost. Therefore, we put those highly accurate solutions to extract text from PDF image on the top of our list. You can check the details and download for a free try.
Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is a productivity program to help you work with PDF files, it converts your PDF files to virtually all popular file formats, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ePub, Text, 15+ formats. Therefore, even without an expensive PDF editor, you can export PDF as other editable formats and edit in your exisiting file editors. In addition, it allows creating PDF from Word, PowerPoint and other files, so you can easily share or print your files in PDF format.
As to its OCR feature, it not only converts your PDF image or image files to searchable PDF for easy text extraction or copying, but also exports them as well-formatted Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ePub format. Still, you can convert multiple PDF image simultaneously. Its OCR function does equivalently excellent job on recognizing PDF image in English, Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Czech, etc.
Main Features of Cisdem PDF Converter OCR
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.13 or later
Also, you can refer to this YouTube tutorial video to extract texts:
If you work on PDF files on a daily basis, you probably have installed Adobe Acrobat, in this case, to extract or copy text from PDF image becomes extremely easy for you. But for users who installed Adobe Acrobat Reader only, you cannot extract or copy the PDF image text, since there is no OCR feature in Adobe Reader.
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For users who want to extract text from PDF image online free, here we also list 3 top and convenient online tools. But before the guide, we’d better have a understanding about limitations of online free tools.
Google Docs is an online free service offered by Google to work on PDF, Word, Image and other documents, users can open, view, edit and export the files. Also, it is capable of processing OCR on scanned PDF and image file. But the biggest problem of using Google Docs to extract text from PDF image is, there are OCR errors and no formatting will be kept in the output file.
OnlineOCR (onlineocr.net) is a simple online OCR tool to directly extract or copy text from PDF image or image files, the recognized text will be displayed on the webpage for easy and fast check. In addition, it supports exporting PDF image as Word or Excel. But you will have to manually revise the OCR errors.
Comparing to above 2 online free tools to extract text from PDF images, Convertio supports more file languages and more output formats. But the main reason why I recommend Convertio OCR lies in that it helps to perform OCR on a file consisting of 2 languages, which will greatly improve the OCR accuracy when dealing with bilingual files. However, you are only allowed to convert 10 pages for free.
When dealing with native PDF instead of those created by scanners or images, extracting text from PDF becomes extremely easy, there is no need to use OCR feature. Here are 2 efficient ways for you.
The easiest way to extract text from PDF files is to use the shortcuts like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. It is quick and can be achieved in most PDF readers or even browsers, however, this method fails when the PDF document is protected from copying or changing. To kill such a problem once for all, we recommend an efficient and powerful PDF editor, that is, Cisdem PDFMaster.
Quite literally, it is a program allowing users to work on all kinds of PDF documents like a PDF master, from editing the text in PDF easily to converting PDF into various other formats. With the help of this software, copying text from secured PDF and scanned PDF is no longer tricky.
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7 Free Download macOS 10.13 or later
When entering "Extract Text from PDF" in Google search field, we found that most people are eager to know how to extract text from PDF using Python. Actually, Python has multiple well-integrated libraries that can help you to extract text from PDF files effectively, like PyPDF2, PyMuPDF, PDFQuery, PDFMiner, PDFPlumber, etc. Here, we will take one of these most commonly used libraries as an example--PyPDF2.
PyPDF2 is a free, open-source Python library, capable of performing a lot of operations on a PDF, like merging, splitting, cropping as well as extracting text from PDF.
from PyPDF2 import PdfReader
reader = PdfReader("example.pdf")
page = reader.pages[0]
print(page.extract_text())
# extract only text oriented up
print(page.extract_text(0))
# extract text oriented up and turned left
print(page.extract_text((0, 80)))
7 ways to extract or copy text from various PDF would be quite enough for you, and for many users seeking a solution on this, they give more credits to a professional standalone OCR program, which is safer to use, faster to process OCR, more accurate on result, even there are extended features offers to boost your productivity on working with PDF files. What about you? Do you have better advice on this? You can share us in the comment.
Jose specializes in reviews, how-to guides, top lists, etc. on PDF, data recovery and multi-media. On his spare time, he likes to travel or challenge some extreme sports.
