OCR PDF: Make Scans Searchable
Turn scanned PDFs and photos into searchable PDFs with selectable text.
Drop scanned PDFs or images here
or select files from your device
Files are processed on this device. Nothing is uploaded.
How to use OCR PDF: Make Scans Searchable
- Add a scanned PDF, or photos of pages.
- Choose the language of the document and the page quality.
- Select Make searchable and download the new PDF. You can also copy all the recognised text.
How it works
A scanned PDF is only pictures of pages, so you cannot search it or copy from it. This tool reads each page with the open-source Tesseract engine and writes a new PDF with the page picture on top of an invisible text layer, positioned word by word. The page looks the same, and search (Ctrl+F), selection and copy now work, as do screen readers.
The recognition engine and the language data are downloaded from this site to your browser the first time (about 6–8 MB for English), then the reading happens on your device. Your pictures, documents and the recognised text are not uploaded.
Each page is drawn at the quality you choose, recognised, and saved as a JPEG-compressed picture with its text layer. Because pages are re-drawn as pictures, a PDF that already contains real text gains nothing: use this for scans and photos.
Example
A 10-page contract scanned to PDF becomes a PDF of similar size in which Ctrl+F finds clause numbers and names. On a typical laptop each page takes a few seconds.
Frequently asked questions
What does OCR do to a PDF?
It recognises the text in the page images and stores it behind them, so the document becomes searchable and its text can be selected and copied. The visible pages do not change.
Is my document uploaded?
No. Recognition happens in your browser on your device, which matters for contracts, IDs and medical or financial papers.
Will the file get bigger?
Pages are re-saved as images at the chosen quality, so the size depends on that setting rather than on the original. 150 DPI gives the smallest file; 300 DPI the sharpest. Run the result through Compress PDF if needed.
Can I convert the scan to Word or Excel?
Not as a laid-out document. You can copy the recognised text and paste it anywhere; tables and formatting are not rebuilt.
How accurate is it?
Clean 300 DPI scans of printed text are typically read with very few errors. Faxes, photos at an angle, stamps and handwriting reduce accuracy. The engine’s confidence is shown after each run.
Limitations
- Handwriting is not supported: the engine is trained on printed text.
- Ten languages are available: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Urdu. Chinese, Japanese and Korean are not included yet.
- Accuracy depends on the picture: blurry, skewed, low-contrast or very small text gives errors. Always check names and numbers.
- Tables and multi-column layouts come out as plain lines of text; the layout is not rebuilt.
- Pages are re-drawn as pictures: vector text and form fields in the original are not kept. Use it on scans, not on PDFs that already have text.
- Up to 200 pages per run; long documents take a few seconds per page.
Last reviewed November 9, 2026. How we build and test tools.