OCR PDF – Make Scanned PDFs Searchable

Free

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) turns images of text into real, searchable text inside your PDF.

Keep the look, gain search, copy, and edit. Works great on mobile.

Drag & drop a PDF here, or

Select PDF

Tip: Scanned pages are auto-detected by default; switch to “All” to OCR everything.

Output

Searchable PDFPlain text (.txt)Both

Language

Enhance contrast (adaptive)

Tip: choose multi-language only when needed (loads more data).

Pages

Only scanned pages (auto-detect)All pagesCustom range

No file

How OCR works

1) Image analysis. Scanner captures page → pixel data. Bright = background; dark = text/shapes.

2) Pre-processing. Clean image: smooth edges, remove speckles, straighten scans, tidy lines, detect scripts.

3) Text recognition. Feature extraction + pattern matching identify characters and words.

4) Post-processing. Add recognized text as invisible layer or export plain text.

What is OCR?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) turns images of text into searchable, machine-readable text inside your PDF.

Will my PDF look the same?

Yes. We keep the original page content and overlay an invisible text layer so appearance is unchanged but text is selectable and searchable.

Does this work on mobile?

Yes. The interface is touch-friendly and works in modern mobile browsers.

Is my file private?

Recognition runs in your browser. Files are not stored on our servers.

How long does OCR take for large PDFs?

OCR speed depends on page count and language. Processing a 100-page scan to make it searchable usually takes under a minute on a modern laptop.