OCR a PDF — Make a Scanned PDF Searchable
Make a scanned PDF searchable online for free. OCR adds an invisible text layer so you can select, copy and search the text — English and Hindi, all in your browser, nothing uploaded.
Drop a PDF here, or click to chooseChoose a scanned PDF. OCR runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
- What does this do to my PDF?
- It reads the text in each scanned page with OCR and adds an invisible, selectable text layer on top of the image. The PDF still looks exactly like your scan, but you can now select, copy and search the words inside it.
- Which PDFs is this for?
- Scanned documents and image-only PDFs — the kind where you can't select any text in a PDF reader. If your PDF already has selectable text, it doesn't need OCR; use PDF to Word instead to pull the text out.
- Why does a large PDF take a while?
- Each page is rendered and read in turn, and OCR is CPU-intensive, so a long document can take some minutes. Everything runs on your own device — the first run also downloads the OCR engine and language data (a few MB), which is then cached.
- Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
- No. Rendering, OCR and the rebuilt PDF all happen entirely in your browser — your document never leaves your device.