OCR a PDF withoutuploading it anywhere
Most OCR sites send your scan to a server to read it. This one recognizes the text right in your browser and makes the scanned PDF searchable. Select, copy, and search the words on the page. The file never leaves your computer.
Text recognition, without the round trip
A scanned PDF is just photographs of paper. There are no letters in the file for a computer to find, which is why search comes up empty and copy grabs nothing. OCR fixes that: it looks at the picture, recognizes the characters, and records what it found.
The unusual part here is where that happens. The recognition engine is downloaded as part of the page and does its reading on your own machine, one page at a time. That trade has a cost we should be honest about: a long scan takes a few minutes, since your computer is doing the work instead of a data center. What you get back is a searchable PDF that was never in anyone else's hands.
What a searchable PDF gets you
Once the text layer is in place, the scan behaves like a normal document. Ctrl+F finds a name buried on page 40. You can copy a paragraph into an email instead of retyping it. Quote a clause, pull a number into a spreadsheet, or let a screen reader speak the page. Old contracts, receipts, letters, and archived records all become documents you can actually work with.
Drop your scanned PDF
Drag and drop an image-only PDF or click to browse.
Run the recognition
Click "Make searchable". Each page is read in your browser and an invisible text layer is built.
Download
Get a searchable PDF. The pages look the same, and the text is now selectable.
OCR questions, answered
What does OCR do to my PDF?+
OCR (optical character recognition) reads the picture of each page and works out what the words are. We then add that recognized text as an invisible layer on top of your pages. The result is a searchable PDF: you can select, copy, and search the text, and the page still looks exactly the same.
How do I make a scanned PDF searchable?+
Drop your scanned PDF onto the tool above, click "Make searchable", and wait while each page is read. When it finishes, download the new file. The text layer is selectable and findable in any PDF reader.
Does my PDF get uploaded anywhere?+
No. The text recognition runs entirely in your browser, on your own device. Your file never leaves your computer, which is not how most OCR sites work: they send your scan to a server to read it.
Which languages does the OCR recognize?+
English gives the best results today. Documents in other languages may still produce some usable text, especially ones that use the Latin alphabet, but accuracy is highest on English.
How good does my scan need to be?+
Clean, straight scans at normal print size recognize best. Skewed pages, low-resolution phone photos, faint ink, and handwriting all lower the accuracy. If a page comes back with garbled words, rescan it flatter and sharper, then run it through again.
Why is it slow on big documents?+
Recognizing text is heavy work, and it happens on your device one page at a time. A long scan can take a few minutes. You can leave the tab open while it works through the pages.
Will the page images change?+
Your original page images stay exactly as they are. The recognized text sits on top invisibly, and the exported file carries no watermark, even on the free plan.
Can I edit the recognized text?+
Searching, selecting, and copying all work after OCR. Editing the words in place is a different job, because the visible page is still an image. For now, copy the recognized text out and edit it wherever you need it.
Make your scan searchable
Drop the PDF in, click Make searchable, and download a copy you can search and quote.
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