OCR PDF – make scans searchable
Recognize the text in scanned PDFs. Get a searchable PDF that looks exactly like the original, plus the plain text.
Your files never leave your deviceDrop a scanned PDF here or click to select
Text recognition runs on your device and can take a few seconds per page
Recognized Text
How to OCR a PDF in 3 Steps
Select Your Scan
Drop a scanned or image-only PDF into the upload box. It is opened locally – nothing is uploaded.
Pick the Language
Choose the language(s) of the document and, if you like, limit OCR to certain pages.
Download the Result
The searchable PDF is downloaded automatically. You can also copy the recognized text or save it as a .txt file.
What Is a Searchable PDF?
A scanned PDF only contains pictures of pages – you cannot search it, select text or copy a quote. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in these pictures. PDFs.app keeps your original pages untouched and places an invisible text layer exactly over the recognized words. The PDF looks the same as before, but now you can search it with Ctrl+F, select and copy text, and document management systems can index it.
Recognition is powered by the open-source Tesseract engine running in your browser via WebAssembly. Supported languages are English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch. Results are best with clear scans of at least 200 dpi and upright pages; handwriting is not recognized.
Frequently Asked Questions about PDF OCR
Will my PDF look different after OCR?
No. The original pages are kept as they are, including their quality and file structure. The recognized text is added as an invisible layer on top, so the result looks identical but is searchable.
Which languages are supported?
English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch. You can select several languages at once for multilingual documents. Each language file (about 1–3 MB) is downloaded once from pdfs.app and cached by your browser.
How long does OCR take?
Usually a few seconds per page, depending on your device and the amount of text. Large documents can take several minutes – you can limit the run to specific pages.
Is OCR always 100% accurate?
No OCR is perfect. Clean, high-contrast scans give excellent results, while blurry photos, unusual fonts, sideways pages or handwriting lead to errors. Please check important text before relying on it.
Are my documents uploaded for OCR?
No. Text recognition runs completely in your browser. Only the language data is downloaded from pdfs.app – your PDF never leaves your device.