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Make scanned PDFs searchable with OCR. Add an invisible, selectable text layer or extract the recognized text. Fast and private.

Select a scanned PDF

Drag & drop your PDF here, or click to browse

Turn images of text into a searchable, selectable document.
Accepted: PDF. Up to 10 MB each.
OCR options
Output
Document language
Choose the main language of the document for the best accuracy.

Your file is processed securely and never shared.

Rendering page previews…
Recognized text
Download .txt

Your searchable PDF is ready

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About OCR PDF — Searchable PDF

OCR PDF makes scanned documents searchable. It runs optical character recognition over an image-only PDF and returns either a searchable PDF — your original pages with an invisible, selectable text layer underneath — or just the recognized plain text, ready to copy or download as a .txt file.

Recognition supports more than a dozen languages, from English, French, German and Spanish to Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hindi, with an auto-detect option. Choosing the document’s main language yields the best accuracy on tricky scans.

The searchable-PDF output looks identical to the original — same pages, same appearance — but suddenly Ctrl+F works, text can be selected and copied, and the document becomes indexable. Processing is deterministic and on-server; no AI model rewrites the content, and your file is handled securely and never shared.

How to use OCR PDF — Searchable PDF

  1. Drag and drop the scanned PDF.
  2. Choose the output: a searchable PDF or just the recognized plain text.
  3. Pick the document language, or leave it on auto-detect.
  4. Click “Make searchable” (or “Extract text”).
  5. Download the searchable PDF, or copy the recognized text / save it as a .txt file.

Frequently asked questions

Yes. Making a scanned PDF searchable or extracting its text is free.

It is your original scan with an invisible text layer added underneath the page images. The document looks unchanged, but you can now search, select and copy the text in any reader.

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hindi — or let the tool auto-detect. Picking the correct main language improves accuracy.

Clean, well-lit scans of printed text recognize very well. Accuracy drops with low resolution, skewed pages or handwriting, so scan at a decent quality and set the right language for best results.

Yes. The file is processed securely on the server, never shared, and cleaned up automatically after a retention window.


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