How to Make a Scanned PDF Searchable (OCR)
A scanned document is just a picture of text — you can't search it, select a sentence, or copy-paste a paragraph. OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that by recognizing the text in the image and adding it back into the PDF as a real, selectable layer, without changing how the page looks. Here's how to do it in your browser, without installing anything or uploading the document anywhere.
Open the OCR PDF tool
Go to the OCR PDF page. No account, no software to install.
Add your scanned PDF
Drag and drop the file onto the page, or click “Browse files” to pick it from your device.
Choose the document's language
Pick English, French, German or Italian, whichever matches the text in your scan — recognition accuracy depends on picking the right one.
Run OCR and download
Click the button to start. Larger documents take longer since each page is processed in turn — a progress indicator shows which page is being read. Once done, download the new PDF: it looks identical to the original, but its text is now searchable, selectable and copyable.
Frequently asked questions
- Does OCR change how the PDF looks?
- No — the recognized text is added as an invisible layer on top of the original page image. Visually, the page is unchanged; the only difference is that its text can now be searched, selected and copied.
- What if a page already has real text (not scanned)?
- Pages that already contain a genuine text layer are detected automatically and left as they are, so OCR only adds text where it's actually missing.
- Which languages are supported?
- English, French, German and Italian for now. Pick the one matching your document for the best accuracy.
- Is OCR accurate?
- It depends on the scan quality — clean, well-lit, straight scans recognize best. Handwriting, very low resolution, or heavily skewed pages will recognize less reliably than a typical office scanner or phone-scanned document.