Extract text from PDFs with state-of-the-art OCR
Upload a PDF and watch our OCR engine transcribe it into structured markdown — tables, formulas, and multilingual text preserved. No API keys to manage, no surprise cloud bill.
Try it nowWhy self-hosted OCR?
Encrypted & ephemeral
Documents are encrypted in transit, processed for extraction, then discarded. Never sold, never used to train models.
Multilingual
German, English, French, Spanish — the original language is preserved exactly, never translated.
Structured output
Markdown with headings, tables, and formulas kept intact. Ready for downstream pipelines.
No throttling
Process dense documents in one pass — unlike metered cloud OCR that stalls or rate-limits heavy batches.
Chats-LLM vs. cloud OCR
| Feature | Chats-LLM | Cloud (Codex / Ollama Max) |
|---|---|---|
| Compute cost | ~50% cheaper | $100+ metered GPU-time |
| Limits | No weekly caps | Weekly caps / throttled |
| Privacy | Processed & deleted | Data sent to cloud |
Need to process thousands of pages?
Create an account to unlock full-document batch extraction with concept tagging powered by our reasoning model — with plans that scale to your volume.
Create an accountFree Online OCR: Extract Text From PDF Files
Chat LLM's free online OCR tool turns any PDF into clean, editable text in seconds. Powered by the GLM-OCR vision model running on our own GPU infrastructure, it recognizes printed text, lists and structured layouts without installing anything or creating an account. Upload a document, wait a moment, and copy the result wherever you need it.
Unlike most free converters, there is no watermark, no forced signup and no subscription. Anonymous visitors get a free daily quota, and the extracted text can be downloaded as a Markdown file ready for notes, documentation or further processing.
How to Extract Text From a PDF in 3 Steps
- 1
Upload your PDF
Drag and drop your document onto the tool above, or click to browse. PDF files up to 30 MB and 10 pages are accepted — no preprocessing needed.
- 2
Let GLM-OCR read it
Each page is analyzed by the vision model, which reconstructs paragraphs, lists and tables in natural reading order — not just a raw character dump.
- 3
Copy or download the text
Read the extracted text page by page, copy it to your clipboard, or download everything as a Markdown file for later use.
Who Is This PDF-to-Text Tool For?
Students
Extract quotes and references from lecture PDFs, papers and slides so you can search, cite and summarize them in your own notes.
Developers
Turn documentation, API references and legacy specs into text you can grep, diff and paste into READMEs, tickets or code comments.
Professionals
Pull key clauses out of contracts, invoices and reports without retyping them — then forward the text by email or chat.
Researchers
Digitize passages from long PDFs and archives to quote them accurately in your reviews, abstracts and bibliographies.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the OCR tool really free?
Yes. The tool is free to use within the anonymous daily quota, with no account required. There is no paid tier dedicated to OCR — the tool is a showcase of what the platform can do.
Do I need to create an account?
No. You can extract text from PDFs as a guest. Creating a free Chat LLM account only raises your quota and unlocks the wider AI chat platform.
Which file formats are supported?
Currently the tool accepts PDF documents, including multi-page files up to 10 pages and 30 MB per upload. Other formats such as JPG or PNG images are not accepted yet.
Which languages can it recognize?
The underlying GLM-OCR model is multilingual and handles Latin-script languages well — including English, French, Spanish and Russian — as well as mixed-language documents.
What happens to my files?
Documents are processed in memory to generate the text and are not stored after the extraction completes. We do not use your files to train models.