Make Scanned PDFs Searchable — Free OCR
Add an invisible text layer to scanned PDFs so you can search, select and copy text. OCR runs on your device — nothing is uploaded.
Help shape Make Scanned PDFs Searchable — Free OCR
The bug you just noticed will fade in 3 minutes. The feature idea will vanish after your next tab switch. Crazy peps don't suffer silently.
Frequently Asked Questions
Scanned PDFs are just pictures of text. OCR reads the text and places it invisibly on top of each page, so Ctrl+F, selecting and copying work — while the page looks exactly the same.
English and most Latin-script languages, Chinese, Japanese and Greek by default, plus Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi and other Devanagari, Thai, Tamil and Telugu from the language menu.
No. Baidu's open-source PaddleOCR runs inside your browser. The only download is the model itself, once; after that OCR works offline and your documents never leave your device.
Roughly 2–10 seconds per page on a typical laptop, depending on the accuracy level and how dense the page is. Pages that already contain real text are skipped automatically.
Yes. Switch on “Also export a .txt file” to download the recognised text alongside the searchable PDF, or use our Image to Text tool for editable output.