OCR PDF on iPhone and iPad

Overview

OCR turns pictures of text into real, searchable text. PDF JustFit extracts text from PDFs and automatically recognises scanned pages, which is what allows a scanned document to take part in search and in AI document chat.

Why scanned PDFs behave differently

A scanned PDF is a container full of page images. To a computer it is a picture of a page, not a page of text. You can read it, but you cannot select it, search it or index it — and neither can any tool that reads the document later.

OCR (optical character recognition) analyses those page images and reconstructs the text layer. Once that text exists, the document becomes searchable and machine-readable.

How PDF JustFit handles OCR

• Extracts text from PDFs that already contain a text layer.
• Automatically OCRs scanned pages, so nothing is left out of the index.
• Runs on-device as part of the local document pipeline.

How OCR enables AI document chat

OCR is the step that connects a scanned document to AI question answering. A scanned PDF becomes: OCR text, then a document index, then retrievable content for the on-device model.

Without OCR, a scanned document is invisible to the AI chat feature — the model would only see page images. With OCR, the content of those pages becomes part of the document index.

OCR and PDF to text

OCR also powers PDF to text conversion. PDF JustFit can extract the text of a PDF — including a scanned one — into a TXT file, which is convenient when the content needs to be reused elsewhere.

Key facts

• Extracts text from PDFs
• Automatic OCR for scanned pages
• On-device processing
• Feeds the AI document index
• Supports PDF to TXT export

Available in PDF JustFit: Compress, AI Chat on iPhone and iPad. Requires iOS/iPadOS 26.5 or later. US price $9.99.