Can it read text from a scanned PDF?

Yes. OCR PDF reads the text on each scanned page and adds it invisibly underneath, so you can search and copy it while the scan looks exactly the same. It follows the same rule as every other tool: the OCR engine and its language model are files hosted on Fair Go PDF itself and run in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is fetched from outside servers. The catch is size. The first run downloads about 33 MB, which your browser then keeps, and each page takes roughly 5 to 20 seconds. It works best on clear, upright English or other Latin-script text, and handwriting isn't supported. Once a scan has its text layer, tools like Extract PDF Text, PDF to Word, Read Aloud and Compare PDFs (which compares the text of two files, not how they look) can read it too.