OCR PDF

Make a scanned PDF searchable and selectable.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded to our server.

What to expect from the outputOCR accuracy depends on scan quality. Clean 300 DPI scans of printed text typically read at well above 95% accuracy. Low-resolution scans, handwriting, unusual fonts and skewed pages produce noticeably more errors. Always proofread output you intend to rely on.

About this tool

A scanned page is just a picture — you cannot search it or copy from it. OCR reads the characters in the image and adds an invisible text layer behind the page, so the document looks identical but becomes searchable.

How to use this tool

Select a scanned PDF or an image.
Choose the language of the document — accuracy depends heavily on this.
Click Run OCR. Recognition takes a few seconds per page.
Download the searchable PDF, or copy the extracted plain text.

How it works

Recognition runs locally using a WebAssembly build of the Tesseract engine. The language data downloads once and is cached by your browser, so subsequent runs start faster.

Frequently asked questions

Which languages are supported?

The tool ships with a broad set including English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and more. Pick the one that matches your document — using the wrong language sharply reduces accuracy.

Why is OCR slower than the other tools?

Character recognition is genuinely heavy computation, and it runs on your own device rather than on a server. Expect a few seconds per page, longer on a phone.

Does the page look different afterwards?

No. The original image is kept exactly as it was and the recognised text is placed invisibly behind it, so the page looks unchanged but is now searchable.