New
PDF to Word
Turn a PDF's text into an editable Word document, with headings, paragraphs and page breaks.
How it works
OCR PDF
Turn scanned PDFs into searchable documents. Text on every page is recognised and added as an invisible layer, so you can search, select and copy it, and the scan still looks exactly the same.
Recognised text
- 01
Drop in a scanned PDF and choose the document's language.
- 02
Optionally limit OCR to certain pages, then click Make searchable.
- 03
Download the searchable PDF, and copy or save the recognised text.
About this tool
What OCR does for a scanned PDF
A scanned document is just a picture of text: you can't search it, select a sentence or copy a number from it. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in the image and turns them into real text.
This tool runs the Tesseract OCR engine in your browser, page by page. It adds the recognised words to the original PDF as an invisible layer lined up with the text on the page, the same approach professional scanners use. The pages look unchanged, but Ctrl+F, copy and paste, and screen readers now work. You also get all the recognised text to copy or download as a .txt file.
Searchable PDF
An invisible text layer is added; the scan looks exactly the same.
Text you can copy
See, copy or download every recognised word as plain text.
8 languages
English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and Swedish.
Skips digital pages
Pages that already have text are left alone.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the OCR?
Clean, straight scans at 300 DPI usually recognise very accurately. Low-resolution photos, handwriting, unusual fonts and skewed pages reduce accuracy.
Are my files uploaded?
No. Recognition runs in your browser. The first time, the OCR engine and language data (about 10 MB) are downloaded from a public CDN; your document itself never leaves your device.
How long does it take?
Usually a few seconds per page, depending on your device. A 20-page scan typically takes one to two minutes.
Why aren't some characters searchable?
The invisible text layer uses a standard font that covers Western European characters. Letters outside that set appear in the extracted text but aren't added to the PDF's search layer.
Can I edit the text afterwards?
Use PDF to Word on the searchable PDF to get an editable document.
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