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OCR a PDF Online — Turn Scans Into Searchable Text

Recognise text in scanned and image-based PDFs so you can copy, search or edit it. Currently in beta — English-first recognition.

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Make a scanned PDF searchable

Drop your scanned PDF and let our background OCR (Tesseract.js, English) turn images of text into selectable, editable text.

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Beta: English-first. Marathi / Hindi / Arabic OCR is on our roadmap. Recognition quality depends on scan DPI — 300 DPI typed gives near-perfect results, 200 DPI is usable, below that struggles.

OCR a scanned PDF online

A scanned PDF is, technically, a sequence of JPEG images wrapped in PDF metadata. There is no text layer to copy, search, or edit. OCR — Optical Character Recognition — looks at each pixel pattern and infers the underlying letters, then we attach that recognised text as an invisible layer over the image so you can select / copy / edit it like a normal PDF.

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Frequently asked questions

Which languages are supported today?
English in this Beta. We will ship 100+ Tesseract language models lazily in V2 so it does not slow down first load.
How accurate is OCR?
On a clean 300 DPI typed document, expect >97% character accuracy. On photographed paper at varied lighting, 88-94%. Handwriting is not supported.
Is OCR processing private?
Yes. Tesseract.js runs in a Web Worker inside your browser. We never see your scan.
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