OCR PDF

Scanned documents, photographed receipts, and image-only PDFs are essentially pictures of text — you cannot search through them, select words, or use Ctrl+F to find specific content. OCR PDF (Optical Character Recognition) analyses each page image, identifies characters and words, and adds an invisible searchable text layer that matches the visual layout — turning a static scan into a fully searchable document.

The OCR engine processes each page image using pattern recognition models trained on diverse fonts and handwriting styles. The resulting text layer is embedded beneath the original image, so the PDF looks exactly the same visually but now supports text selection, search, copy-paste, and accessibility screen reader tools.

Supported languages:

• English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese

Selecting the correct language significantly improves accuracy, particularly for documents with diacritical marks (accents, umlauts) or non-Latin scripts.

OCR accuracy factors:

• Scan quality: higher DPI (300+ recommended) scans produce significantly better results
• Font clarity: clear printed text converts near-perfectly; complex decorative fonts or handwriting are less accurate
• Page orientation: the OCR engine auto-detects and corrects minor rotations, but severely skewed pages reduce accuracy

After OCR processing, you can use our PDF to Text tool to extract the recognised text as a plain .txt file. For converting a scanned PDF to an editable Word document, run OCR first and then use PDF to Word.

Privacy: Scanned documents are processed on isolated servers and deleted within one hour. No text or image content is retained. The tool is free with no account required.