OPTIMIZE2026-07-056 min read
OCR Guide: Extract text from scanned documents locally
Step-by-step tutorial on using local WebAssembly Tesseract engines to read text content from scans and images without cloud servers.
Scanned PDFs are essentially just image files, which makes copying text or searching for words impossible. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), you can reconstruct text shapes back into searchable characters. Here is how to run it securely in your browser.
Local WASM-based OCR Engines
Rather than sending images to cloud APIs that parse your files, PDFVerse utilizes the WebAssembly port of the open-source Tesseract OCR project. Your browser executes the OCR scanner inside a isolated worker process, leaving your privacy 100% untouched.