OCR in the Browser: How Tesseract.js Makes PDF Text Extraction Free

You've got a 200-page PDF that someone scanned years ago. It's just images of pages — Cmd-F finds nothing. You need to extract the text, search through it, maybe paste a paragraph into a doc. Five years ago, this meant a cloud OCR API at $1.50 per 1,000 pages, plus uploading your potentially-sensitive PDF to a third-party service. Now it means dropping the file into a tab and waiting two minutes. The thing that made the difference is Tesseract.js — and understanding what it does, where it shines