How to make a scanned PDF searchable (OCR)

A scanned PDF is just a picture of each page: you can’t search it, select the text or copy a sentence. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text in the image and adds it back to the file.

Step by step

1. Open OCR PDF and select one scanned or image-based PDF.
2. Click Run OCR. The first time, your browser downloads a small English language model (about 9 MB); after that it works offline.
3. When it finishes, choose Download PDF for a searchable PDF, or Download text (.txt) for the plain text.

How to get accurate results

• Clear, high-resolution scans (200–300 DPI) work best.
• Straight pages read better than tilted ones — rotate sideways pages first with Rotate PDF.
• Printed text is recognised far more reliably than handwriting.
• OCR currently recognises English text.

What can I do with the result?

Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F) in any PDF reader to find words, copy quotes into an email, or convert the searchable PDF into an editable document with PDF to Word.

All recognition runs on your own device, which makes OCR safe for scanned contracts, medical letters and ID documents.