Add search without flattening pages
Scanned pages receive an invisible text layer aligned to recognized text. The visible page remains the original PDF content.
PDF tool
Searchable OCR PDF
Make scanned and image-only PDF pages searchable with an invisible searchable text layer, entirely in your browser.
Make a scanned PDF searchable
The original page graphics, dimensions, and rotation stay unchanged. OCR may misread tiny, blurred, or ambiguous characters. Verify important names, identifiers, amounts, and addresses. Complex multi-column layouts may not copy in perfect reading order.
Select, process, download
- Select one PDF.
- Choose the text language, then Make PDF searchable.
- Wait while image-only pages are recognized.
- Download and search the completed PDF.
OCR only where needed
Native text is preserved. OCR starts lazily for scanned pages and image regions, using one serialized session for the document.
Clean scans work best
Faint text, handwriting, unusual fonts, perspective distortion, and complex graphics can reduce recognition quality or alignment.
Helpful answers
Searchable PDF FAQs
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. PDF inspection, page rendering, OCR, text-layer placement, and final PDF creation happen in your browser. Language assets may download on first use. Once the engine and selected language are cached, OCR can work offline in the loaded tool. Your PDF is not uploaded.
Does this change how the PDF looks?
The original PDF pages remain in place. The tool adds invisible selectable text over scanned pages, leaving the visible page unchanged.
Are existing text pages OCRed again?
No. Native text pages without scanned image regions are preserved without OCR. Hybrid pages retain native text while OCR adds missing text from scanned regions.
Which OCR languages are supported?
Choose English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, or Dutch. English is selected by default. For mixed-language documents, you can set a different language on individual pages. Handwriting is not supported.
How accurate is the searchable text?
OCR may misread tiny, blurred, or ambiguous characters. Verify important names, identifiers, amounts, and addresses. Complex multi-column layouts may not copy in perfect reading order.
Will search text align perfectly?
Alignment is approximate and depends on scan clarity, rotation, perspective, and OCR accuracy. Clean, straight document scans work best.