About OCR PDF
OCR PDF reads the text in a scanned document and rebuilds it as a searchable PDF. Each page keeps its original scanned appearance, with an invisible text layer positioned over the recognized words — so you can search, select and copy text that used to be nothing but pixels.
Recognition runs locally with Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly, currently in English. It is slower than a server-side service because the work happens on your own processor, and that is the deliberate trade: a scanned contract, bank statement or medical record is never uploaded.
How to use OCR PDF
- Select the scanned PDF you want to make searchable.
- Start the OCR run and watch the per-page progress.
- Wait for every page to finish — long documents take a while, since recognition runs on your device.
- Download the searchable PDF and try selecting text in your viewer.
Frequently asked questions
Which languages are supported?
English only at the moment. Text in other languages will still be processed, but accuracy will be poor.
Does OCR change how my document looks?
No. The original page image is kept and the recognized text is placed invisibly on top, so the document looks identical but becomes searchable.
Why is it slower than other OCR sites?
Those services run recognition on their servers, which means uploading your document first. Here it runs on your own CPU, so nothing is transmitted.