Make a scanned PDF searchable (OCR)
Scans and photos of documents only contain images: you cannot search them or copy their text. Optical character recognition (OCR) with Tesseract adds an invisible text layer on top of each page, while the page itself looks exactly as before.
Drop a file here
or click to choose · PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF
Your files are processed on your device and never uploaded.
How to use this tool
- 1
Add a scanned PDF or an image of a document.
- 2
Choose the language of the text.
- 3
Start and download the searchable PDF.
Supported formats
- Accepted
- PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF
- Output
- PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF
Limits
- Max. 50 MB per file
- Up to 300 pages per PDF
- Max. 25 MB per file
- Up to 100 megapixels per image
- Your files are processed on your device and never uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the recognition?
Clean, straight scans with 300 dpi give very good results. Handwriting, very small print, low contrast or skewed pages reduce accuracy.
Is there a page limit?
Yes, OCR is slow, so up to 50 pages are processed per file. Split longer documents first.
Which languages are supported?
English, German, Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. English is always recognised in addition to the language you choose.
Related tools
- JPG to PDFConvert JPG, PNG, WebP or AVIF images into one PDF. Choose A4, Letter or original size and margins. Up to 50 images, free.
- Compress PDFMake PDFs smaller by optimizing embedded images and the file structure. Three compression levels. Honest result: if it doesn't get smaller, you get your original.