PDF OCR

Make scanned PDFs searchable: OCR recognises the text (English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German) and adds an invisible text layer. Private.

Scanned documents are pictures of text: you can't search them, copy from them or let screen readers read them. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text and adds it as an invisible layer, so the PDF looks exactly the same but becomes searchable and copyable.

OCR runs on your own device with the open-source Tesseract engine, so even confidential scans stay private. The reading engine and language files download once and are then reused.

How to use PDF OCR

  1. Click “Choose PDF file” or drop your scanned PDF onto the page.
  2. Choose the language(s) of the text — up to three, e.g. English + Hindi.
  3. Leave all pages selected (pages that already have text are skipped), or click pages to leave them out.
  4. Click “Make searchable” and download the searchable PDF (and, if you like, the text file).

Features

  • Searchable, copyable text on top of the unchanged page images.
  • English, Hindi, Spanish, French and German; mix up to three languages.
  • Skips pages that already contain text.
  • Optional plain-text (.txt) download.
  • No upload, no sign-up, no watermark.

Frequently asked questions

How accurate is the OCR?

Clear, straight scans at normal print size are usually recognised very well. Blurry photos, handwriting, unusual fonts and very small text give weaker results.

How long does it take?

A few seconds per page on a laptop, longer on phones. The first time, the reading engine (about 4 MB) and each language (2–4 MB) are downloaded once.

Does the PDF look different afterwards?

No. The page images stay exactly as they are; the recognised text is added invisibly on top, in the right places.

Is my document uploaded?

No. Recognition runs in your browser on your device.

Which languages are supported?

English, Hindi, Spanish, French and German today. More languages can be added — tell us which ones you need.

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