OCR a PDF

Turn a scan into a PDF you can search

A scanner or phone camera saves pages as pictures. You can read them, but your computer can't: Ctrl+F finds nothing, and you can't copy a sentence. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text in those pictures and adds it to the PDF as an invisible layer lined up exactly with the words on the page. The document looks identical, but now it can be searched, highlighted, copied and read aloud by a screen reader.

Recognition runs on your device with the open-source Tesseract engine, so even sensitive scans such as ID documents, medical records and bank letters never leave your computer or phone. Pages that already contain text are skipped automatically, unless you ask otherwise.

How to OCR a PDF

1. 1

   Open the scanned PDF

   Choose the file. The tool tells you which pages already have text.

2. 2

   Choose languages

   Tick English, Hindi or both. Choosing only the languages in the document gives the best accuracy.

3. 3

   Recognize the text

   Each page is read at 300 DPI. You can cancel at any time.

4. 4

   Download

   Save the searchable PDF, and the recognized text as a .txt file if you want it.

Features

• English and Hindi

  Recognize either language, or both on the same page.

• Looks exactly the same

  The original scan is kept, and the text is added invisibly on top.

• Skips pages with text

  Only scanned pages are processed, saving time.

• Plain text export

  Download everything that was recognized as a .txt file.

Getting the best results

OCR accuracy depends mostly on the scan. Pages scanned at 300 DPI, straight and evenly lit, give the best results. Handwriting, very small print, heavy shadows and decorative fonts are hard to read. If the tool warns that confidence is low, try a clearer scan. Recognition takes a few seconds per page, so long documents take a while, especially on phones.