Searchable PDF (OCR)

A scanned contract, a phone-photo receipt or an old letter saved as a PDF is really just pictures of pages. You can read it, but Ctrl+F finds nothing, you can’t copy a sentence, and document search tools treat it as blank. This tool reads the words on each page with OCR (optical character recognition) and writes them back as an invisible text layer lined up word by word with the scan.

The result looks identical to your original — the pages are not redrawn or re-compressed — but now you can search it, highlight and copy text, and paste quotes into an email. Pages that already contain real text are spotted and skipped, so mixed documents don’t end up with doubled text. You can also save everything that was read as a plain .txt file.

Reading happens on your device with Tesseract, the open-source OCR engine, using the same language files as our Image to Text tool. They load from this site once and your browser keeps them. Your PDF is never uploaded, which matters when the scan is a passport, a medical record or a bank letter.

1. Tap “Choose a PDF” or drop your scanned file onto the box.
2. Pick the languages used in the document — up to three. Your browser’s language is chosen for you.
3. Optional: choose Faster, Recommended or Small print, and type the pages to read, such as 1-5, 9.
4. Press “Make searchable” and watch each page tile fill in. Press Cancel to stop and keep the pages already read.
5. Press “Download searchable PDF”, or “Download text (.txt)” for the plain text.

• Invisible text placed word by word over the scan, so search hits and highlights land on the right words.
• The original pages are kept untouched: no re-drawing, no blur, no change in look.
• 19 languages including Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian, up to three at once.
• Skips pages that already have real text, with an option to read them anyway.
• Page range box for reading only the pages you need.
• Three detail levels: Faster, Recommended (300 DPI) and Small print (400 DPI).
• A tile for every page showing waiting, reading, done, skipped or failed, plus overall progress and Cancel.
• Plain-text export of every chosen page, with page headings.
• After saving, the new file is opened by a PDF reader and searched to prove the text is really there.

• Straight, well-lit scans read best. Turn sideways pages the right way up with Rotate PDF first.
• Use “Small print” for footnotes, receipts and dense forms; it is slower but catches tiny text.
• Only tick the languages actually in the document — extra ones slow reading and can cause odd guesses.
• Handwriting is not read reliably; OCR is built for printed text.
• Check names, numbers and amounts in the text export before relying on them. The certainty figure in the result tells you how clearly the pages read.