Skip to main content
Support
PDF & Documents/Make Scanned PDFs Searchable with OCR

Browse by category

All categories

Make Scanned PDFs Searchable with OCR

Make scanned and photographed PDFs searchable: a hidden text layer keeps the look, phone photos are flattened first. English, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Vietnamese and more. Free.

1
Select scanned PDF
Drop or browse a scanned/image PDF up to 50 MB.
2
Pick language and output
Choose the document's language. Pick "Searchable PDF" to keep the original look with a hidden text layer, or "Plain text" for a .txt download.
3
Run OCR
PaddleOCR reads each page in your browser and the result downloads as a searchable PDF or a .txt file. The first run in a language downloads its model once (13 to 99 MB).

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from Extract PDF Text?

Extract PDF Text only works on digital PDFs that already have a text layer (created from Word, Pages, etc.). OCR PDF works on scanned/image PDFs that are just pixels — it recognizes text from the page images.

Which languages can it read?

English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Hindi, Tamil, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Filipino and Swahili. Marathi and Telugu are in beta, marked Beta in the picker; they read, but less accurately, so check the result. Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Burmese are not offered until a model reads them well.

Can it read a photo of a page?

Yes. A page photographed on a desk is found, flattened and levelled before it is read, which matters more for accuracy than anything else on photos. Pages tilted by more than a few degrees, or cut off at the edge, still read worse.

Why are some words wrong?

OCR accuracy depends on the scan quality, contrast, language and font. Pick the document's language; handwriting and blackletter (Fraktur) are not supported. Low-confidence words are left out of the searchable layer.

Tool history

Updated Oct 9, 2026 · 4 updates
  • Oct 9, 2026fixtool-specific cancel ids, beta note in the receipt tracker
  • Oct 9, 2026featchinese (simplified) leaves beta; tamil on the v5 detector
  • Oct 9, 2026fixevery ocr tool words a failed run the same way, offline included
See full history →
This tool is free thanks to our sponsors.Support Loft Tools