Scans and phone photos of documents are just pictures – you cannot search, select or copy their text. OCR PDF runs the Tesseract recognition engine in your browser, then adds an invisible text layer exactly over the words on each page. The PDF looks identical but becomes fully searchable.
How to OCR PDF
- Add scanned PDFs.
- Choose the document language.
- Run OCR and download the searchable PDF.
Good to know
- English recognition data is built in. Other languages download their recognition model (2–15 MB) from the jsDelivr CDN once; your document itself never leaves your device.
- OCR speed depends on your device: expect a few seconds per page on a modern laptop.
- Accuracy is best on clean, straight scans at 200–300 dpi. Handwriting is not reliably recognised.
Frequently asked questions
What does OCR mean?
Optical character recognition: software reading the letters in an image and turning them into real text.
Will the PDF look different after OCR?
No. The original page images stay the same; an invisible text layer is added on top.
Can I OCR a PDF in another language?
Yes. Choose from over 20 languages, including combinations like English + Spanish.