OCR PDF — Make a Scanned PDF Searchable

A scanned page is just a photograph of text — your reader cannot search it because there is no text data in the file. Optical character recognition reads the words from the image and adds them back as an invisible text layer positioned over each word, so Ctrl+F, text selection, and copy/paste all start working while the page still looks exactly the same.

How to make searchable in your browser

  1. 1Add the scanned PDF you want to make searchable.
  2. 2Click Make Searchable. The recognition engine downloads once on first use, then runs entirely on your device.
  3. 3Watch the per-page progress bar — recognition is CPU-intensive, so long documents take a while.
  4. 4Download the searchable PDF and try Ctrl+F to confirm the text layer is working.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will the page still look the same afterwards?

Yes. The original page image is kept as the visible layer and the recognised words are added invisibly on top, aligned to where each word appears. Visually nothing changes — but the text becomes searchable and selectable.

Which languages can it recognise?

This tool currently recognises English text. Documents in other scripts will produce poor results.

Why is OCR slower than the other tools?

Character recognition is genuinely heavy computation, and it runs on your device rather than a server farm. The first run also downloads the recognition model. The upside is that your scanned documents — often the most sensitive kind — never leave your computer.

Are my files uploaded to a server?

No. This tool runs entirely inside your browser using WebAssembly — your file is never uploaded, never stored on a server, and never seen by us. You can confirm it by opening your browser's Network tab while the tool runs, or by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads: it still works.