OCR PDF — Make Scanned PDFs Searchable
Add a text layer to scanned PDF documents so you can search, select, and copy text. Free, secure, no sign-up required.
How to OCR a Scanned PDF
Select the language of the text in your scanned document from the dropdown.
Upload your scanned PDF by clicking the upload area or dragging and dropping it.
Click "Start OCR" to begin. We'll detect scanned pages and add a searchable text layer.
Frequently Asked Questions
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts images of text — like scanned documents or photos of pages — into actual searchable and selectable text within your PDF.
No. The visual appearance stays identical. We add an invisible text layer behind the scanned images so you can search, select, and copy text without altering the document's look.
We support 14 languages including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Indonesian, Turkish, Polish, and Vietnamese.
We automatically skip pages that already contain selectable text. Only scanned or image-based pages are processed with OCR.
Yes. Your PDF is processed on our servers and deleted immediately after OCR. We never store or access your documents.
Yes, completely free. No sign-up, no watermarks, no limits.