Make scanned PDFs searchable. Everything runs locally in your browser — your files are never uploaded to a server, no registration is required, and the tool is completely free.
How to OCR PDF
Upload the scanned PDF you want to make searchable.
Each page is rendered to an image and read by the Tesseract OCR engine, running locally in your browser.
The recognised words are written back onto the page as an invisible text layer, positioned over the original scan.
Download the searchable PDF — it looks identical, but you can now search, select, and copy its text in any reader.
Features
Invisible Text Layer: The scanned page image is kept exactly as it was and the recognised text is drawn invisibly on top of it. The page looks untouched, but Ctrl+F now finds words on it.
Tesseract Recognition on Your Device: OCR uses the Tesseract engine compiled to WebAssembly. The first run downloads a ~7 MB English recognition model and caches it in your browser for next time — the document itself is never uploaded.
Searchable, Selectable, Copyable: Once the text layer exists, scanned contracts, receipts, and archived paperwork behave like ordinary digital documents: full-text search finds them and you can copy passages straight out.
Accuracy Follows Scan Quality: Clean, straight text scanned at around 300 DPI is read very accurately. Handwriting, low-resolution photos of pages, and skewed or noisy scans produce noticeably more mistakes.
Frequently asked questions
Which languages can it recognise?
English. The bundled Tesseract model is trained on English text, so pages in other languages will produce poor results.
Why is there a download the first time I run OCR?
Recognition needs a trained model, about 7 MB, which is fetched once and then cached by your browser for every later run. The model comes down to your device — your document never goes up.
How long does it take?
Expect a few seconds per page, since every page is rasterized and analysed by your own CPU. A long document takes a while, so leave the tab open until it finishes.
Will the pages look different afterwards?
No. The original page image is preserved and the text layer is rendered invisibly over it, so the output is visually identical to the scan you uploaded.
Can I edit the recognised text?
Not here — this tool makes the scan searchable rather than editable. If you need editable content, run the OCR output through the PDF to Word tool, which can then extract real text instead of an image.
Is my scanned document sent anywhere for recognition?
No. Unlike cloud OCR services, everything happens in your browser. That matters for scans of IDs, medical records, and contracts, which never leave your device at any point.