OCR PDF

OCR PDF turns a scanned PDF, where each page is only a photo, into a searchable PDF: you can press Ctrl+F to find words, select and copy text, and let your computer's search index it. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in the image. This tool uses Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine, running inside your browser, and supports 24 languages including English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Each chosen page is drawn at 200 DPI (or 300 DPI for small or faint print), read by Tesseract, and every recognised word is placed as invisible text exactly over the word you see, the same way scanner software builds searchable PDFs. Your original pages are not changed or recompressed, so the scan looks exactly as before. Pages that already have selectable text are skipped by default, and you can choose a page range. You also get the recognised text as a separate .txt file.

Limits: accuracy depends on the scan. Clean printed text at 300 DPI reads well; handwriting, low-contrast, skewed or very small text can produce wrong or missing words. Each page takes a few seconds, so long documents take minutes. The OCR engine and the language data (about 2 to 15 MB per language) download once from a public code CDN the first time you use them; your PDF itself never leaves your device. Password-protected PDFs must have the password removed first.

A scanned contract, invoice or textbook is useless to search: you cannot find a clause, copy a figure or quote a line. Adding a text layer fixes that without changing how the document looks, and doing it in your browser keeps confidential scans off other people's servers.