OCR PDF — Make a Scanned PDF Searchable
Turn scanned or photographed PDFs into searchable, selectable PDFs. Pages keep their exact look — an invisible text layer is added on top. Free, no sign-up, and your file never leaves your browser.
Free · No sign-upHow to use OCR PDF
- 1. Choose the language(s) used in the document (up to 3, e.g. English + Spanish). Optionally enter a page range like 1-3, 5, 8-end.
- 2. Drop your scanned PDF into the box. The OCR engine and language data download once, then every page is read on your device, with progress and time left.
- 3. Pages that already have selectable text are skipped automatically — tick Also OCR pages that already have selectable text to include them.
- 4. Click Download searchable PDF. You can also Copy all text or download it as a .txt file.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The PDF is opened with pdf.js, read by the open-source Tesseract.js OCR engine and rebuilt with pdf-lib, all inside your browser. Only the engine and the language data are downloaded the first time; your document never leaves your device.
Will the searchable PDF look different from my scan?
No. The original pages are kept as they are; the tool only adds an invisible text layer on top of each page, placed over the matching words, so you can search, select and copy while the page looks the same. The file is re-saved, so existing digital signatures become invalid.
Which languages are supported?
20 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Indonesian. You can combine up to 3 in one document, for example English + Spanish.
What happens to pages that already have text?
Pages with 30 or more characters of selectable text are skipped by default so they don't get a second text layer; their existing text is still included in the copied and .txt text. Tick Also OCR pages that already have selectable text to OCR every page in the range anyway — on those pages the text may then appear twice when you copy or search.
How accurate is the OCR, and how long does it take?
Clean scans at 200–300 DPI usually come out nearly word-perfect. Faint, blurry, handwritten or sideways pages read worse, and slightly tilted scans are handled. Each page is read at about 300 DPI and typically takes a few seconds; the progress bar shows the time left, and you can cancel at any time.
Is there a page or file size limit?
There is no fixed limit and it is free with no sign-up, but everything runs in your browser's memory, so very large files are slower, especially on phones. Use the page range to OCR part of a long document. Password-protected or encrypted PDFs must be unlocked first.