What does OCR do to my PDF?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads text from scanned images in your PDF and adds an invisible, searchable text layer. The visual appearance stays exactly the same — you can now select, copy, and search the text.

Will OCR change how my PDF looks?

No. The original images are preserved. OCR only adds a hidden text layer underneath, so the document looks identical but becomes searchable.

What languages are supported?

We support 30+ languages including English, Czech, Slovak, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, and more. You can select up to 3 languages for multilingual documents.

What if my PDF already has selectable text?

Pages that already contain text are automatically skipped. Only scanned/image pages get OCR applied. This makes the process faster and avoids duplicating existing text.

How accurate is the OCR?

We use Tesseract, the most widely-used open-source OCR engine. Accuracy is excellent for clean, well-scanned documents (95%+). Handwritten text, very low resolution, or heavily skewed pages may have lower accuracy.

Is there a page limit?

You can process PDFs with up to 50 pages. File size limit is 50 MB. OCR is CPU-intensive, so large documents may take a few minutes.

OCR PDF - Make Scanned PDF Searchable

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OCR — Make PDF Searchable

Add a searchable text layer to scanned documents

Upload a scanned PDF and we'll add an invisible text layer using OCR. The result looks identical but you can select, copy, and search the text. Pages that already have text are skipped automatically.

Document language (select up to 3)

Frequently Asked Questions