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Make a PDF Searchable (OCR)

Scanned PDFs are just pictures: you can't search or select their text. This tool runs OCR in your browser and adds an invisible text layer on top, so the document becomes searchable while looking exactly the same.

Scanned documents are often the most sensitive ones (IDs, contracts, medical records). This OCR runs entirely on your device; the file is never uploaded anywhere.

Drag your scanned PDF here

or choose from your computer

How it works

  • Each scanned page is rendered and OCR'd with Tesseract.js, then every recognized word is placed at its exact position as invisible text with pdf-lib. The visible page is byte-for-byte the original.
  • Search, select, copy: after processing, Ctrl/Cmd+F and text selection work in any PDF reader, because the text layer is real PDF text.
  • Limitations: recognition quality depends on scan quality; low-confidence words are skipped. Rotated pages and non-Latin scripts placed via the built-in fonts aren't supported yet.