OCR PDF — Make Scanned PDFs Searchable
Turn a scanned PDF, or a set of photos of pages, into a searchable PDF. Every page keeps its original look, and an invisible layer of recognised text is added on top so you can press Ctrl+F, select and copy. It all happens in your browser — your document is never uploaded.
One or more PDFs (each becomes its own searchable PDF), or several JPG/PNG images that are combined into one PDF in the order you pick them.
🔒 Processed on your device — nothing is uploaded. Up to 100 MB per file.
Make Any Scanned PDF Searchable — Without Uploading It
A scanned PDF is a stack of pictures. You can read it, but your computer can't: Ctrl+F finds nothing, you can't select a sentence, and copying gives you an image instead of text. OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that by recognising the letters on each page. This tool adds the recognised text to your PDF as an invisible layer that sits exactly on top of the words, so the document looks identical but now behaves like a digital PDF.
Most online OCR services upload your file to their servers to do this. Here the Tesseract engine runs inside your browser instead, so contracts, bank statements, HR records and medical letters never leave your device. There is no page limit, no watermark and no sign-up.
How to OCR a PDF
- Add your scan — drop a PDF, or several photos of pages (they are combined in the order you select them).
- Choose the language — 21 are available, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and the major European languages. Each language is downloaded once (1–3 MB) and then cached.
- Download the searchable PDF — open it in any viewer and search, select or copy text. You can also download all recognised text as a
.txtfile.
What changes in your PDF — and what doesn't
- Pages look exactly the same. The original page images are kept untouched; the text layer is invisible.
- Pages that already contain text are skipped by default, so mixed documents (a typed letter with a scanned attachment) only get OCR where it is needed and nothing is duplicated.
- Rotated pages stay aligned. Pages stored sideways with a rotation flag get a text layer that matches what you see.
- Photos are fine. Shadows, uneven light and paper tint are flattened automatically before recognition, and small print is enlarged.
Why make PDFs searchable?
Searchable PDFs let you find a clause in a 200-page contract in seconds, copy figures from a scanned statement into a spreadsheet, and let Windows Search, SharePoint, Google Drive or Outlook index the content. They are also far more accessible: screen readers can read the text layer aloud. Many document management and e-filing systems require searchable PDFs.
Accuracy tips
- Scan at 200–300 dpi in greyscale or colour; choose Best for small print for footnotes and fine print.
- Select the right language, and keep Text also contains English ticked for mixed-language documents.
- Handwriting is not recognised reliably — OCR is designed for printed and typed text.
- Need an editable document instead? Use Scan to Word. Need just the text from an image? Use Image to Text.
Speed
On a typical laptop each page takes one to three seconds, and several pages are recognised in parallel on multi-core computers. A 20-page scan is usually done in under a minute. Very large documents work too — they just take longer, and nothing has to be uploaded or downloaded except the result you save.