OCR French PDF
Recognize French text from scans with high accuracy on accents, ligatures, and special characters. Free, 100+ languages supported.
French OCR has its own quirks: the cedilla (ç), four kinds of accents (é, è, ê, ë), the œ ligature, and tightly-spaced apostrophes that can confuse character segmentation. PDFOnly tunes Tesseract for French specifically, with the standard French language pack and proper character set handling.
Common use cases: digitizing scanned legal documents from France, Belgium, Quebec, or Switzerland; making French academic papers searchable for citation; processing customer support tickets attached as scanned PDFs; or building a searchable archive of French-language books. The output PDF looks identical to the scan but is fully searchable, copyable, and indexable by search engines (so French-language SEO works on scanned content).
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Frequently asked questions
Does it handle the œ ligature?
Yes — Tesseract's French model recognizes œ and Œ correctly. Lower-resolution scans sometimes split it into 'oe', which is acceptable in modern French but technically incorrect. Re-scan at 300 DPI if exact ligature preservation matters.
What about French Canadian (Quebec) French?
Same model handles both Iberian/European French and Quebec French. Spelling differences are minor enough that Tesseract handles both uniformly.
Can I mix French and English?
Yes — specify both languages in the picker. Useful for bilingual Canadian documents, France-UK contracts, or academic papers with English abstracts on French content.