PDF OCR API

Extract text from PDF files using OCR (Tesseract). Supports scanned documents, images, and multi-page PDFs. Returns structured text with page numbers and confidence scores.

Features

• OCR extraction via Tesseract (eng, spa, fra, deu supported)
• Multi-page PDFs with parallel processing (4 pages at a time)
• Page range selection (e.g., "1-5" or "1,3,5")
• Output formats: JSON, plain text, or Markdown
• Webhook support for async workflows
• 100MB file size limit, 500 page limit
• Pay-per-page billing — demo mode is free

Quick Start

{
  "pdfUrl": "https://example.com/document.pdf",
  "language": "eng",
  "outputFormat": "json"
}

Demo Mode

Set demoMode: true to test with sample data — no charges. When ready for real results, set demoMode: false and provide a PDF URL or Base64.

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
pdfUrl	string	Yes*	URL of the PDF file to process
pdfBase64	string	Yes*	Base64-encoded PDF (alternative to URL)
language	string	No	OCR language: eng, spa, fra, deu (default: eng)
pageRange	string	No	Pages to process (e.g., "1-5" or "1,3,5")
outputFormat	string	No	Output format: text, json, markdown
detectTables	boolean	No	Attempt to preserve table structure
webhookUrl	string	No	Webhook URL for async results
demoMode	boolean	No	Return sample output without processing (free)

*Either pdfUrl or pdfBase64 is required

Output Format

{
  "success": true,
  "fileName": "document.pdf",
  "totalPages": 5,
  "processedPages": 5,
  "language": "eng",
  "processingTime": 2.3,
  "pages": [
    {
      "pageNumber": 1,
      "text": "This is the extracted text from page 1...",
      "confidence": 95.2,
      "wordCount": 342,
      "hasImages": true
    }
  ],
  "fullText": "Complete document text concatenated...",
  "wordCount": 1250,
  "averageConfidence": 94.5
}

Pricing

Pay-per-page billing:

• $0.10 per page processed with OCR
• Demo mode is free (no charge)
• Only charged for pages that produce output

Cost Examples

Document	Pages	Cost
Single invoice	1	$0.10
10-page contract	10	$1.00
50-page report	50	$5.00

Use Cases

• Invoice processing: Extract line items, totals, dates
• Document digitization: Make scanned documents searchable
• Contract analysis: Extract key terms and clauses
• Academic papers: Extract text from PDF research papers
• Legal discovery: Process document sets at scale
• Form processing: Pull data from scanned forms

Common Problems

Empty or low-confidence results

Cause: The PDF may be image-heavy with poor scan quality. Fix: Try increasing DPI by using a higher-quality source scan. Ensure the correct language is selected.

Timeout errors

Cause: Very large or complex pages can exceed processing limits. Fix: Use pageRange to process specific pages instead of the entire document.

Demo data showing instead of real results

Cause: demoMode is still set to true. Fix: Set demoMode: false and provide a pdfUrl or pdfBase64.

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Built by John Rippy | LinkedIn | Website