Searchable PDF from a Scan
Choose a scanned PDF or an image, pick the document language and download a PDF whose text you can search, select and copy.
The OCR engine and language data (about 15 MB) are downloaded from a CDN the first time you run it. Your file itself never leaves the browser.
Choose a scanned PDF or an image.
About this tool
A scan is just a picture, so Ctrl+F finds nothing in it. OCR recognises the words and writes them into the PDF as an invisible text layer positioned exactly over the image: the page still looks like the scan, but search, selection and copy all work, and so does indexing by document management systems.
Recognition runs with Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly, entirely on your device. The engine and the language model — roughly 15 MB — are fetched from a CDN the first time and cached by the browser afterwards; your document itself is never sent anywhere. Up to 30 pages are processed per run, and accuracy depends on scan quality: 300 DPI and straight pages give the best results.
Frequently asked questions
- Will the pages still look the same?
- Yes. The image is kept and the recognised text is placed invisibly on top, which is how searchable PDFs work everywhere.
- How accurate is it?
- Good on clean 300 DPI scans of printed text, worse on photos, skewed pages, handwriting or heavy background patterns.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. Only the OCR engine and the language data are downloaded; the file is processed in your browser.