Make a Scanned PDF Searchable

The pages keep the scanned image you see, and a text layer is placed invisibly behind it. You can select, copy and search the words as if the document had been typed, even though the picture is unchanged.

Scanned or photographed documents that have no selectable text. A normal PDF made from a word processor already contains its text — use PDF to Text for that, which is faster and exact.

English only for now. The English language data is bundled with the tool, so recognition works offline and nothing is downloaded from a third party.

No. The PDF is rendered and recognised inside your browser. The file never leaves your device, and neither the recognised text nor the new PDF is sent anywhere.

It looks like a scan of the original: the page image is re-rendered at the quality you pick, so fine detail depends on that setting. Page size matches the original, and the invisible text layer sits behind the image.

For a clean, upright, well-lit scan it is usually very good. Accuracy drops with skew, low resolution, faint print, handwriting and unusual fonts, so always check figures and names.

PDF to Text just copies an existing text layer, which is instant. OCR has to render each page to an image, analyse the pixels and build a new text layer, which takes a second or two per page.

Not directly — the whole document is read. For a very long scan, extract the pages you need first with Extract PDF Pages, then run OCR on the smaller file.

The picture keeps them exactly as scanned, but the text layer follows reading order, so searching works while a complex table may not copy out with its alignment intact.