About the OCR PDF
Reads the text out of a scanned PDF - a photograph of a page, where there is no text layer to extract - and hands back both the plain text and a searchable copy of the original. The searchable PDF looks identical but carries an invisible text layer underneath, so Ctrl+F finds words and the content can be copied. Recognition runs in your browser; the document is never uploaded.
What OCR does to a scanned PDF
A scan is a picture of a page, so you cannot search it, select a sentence or copy a figure out of it. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in the image and adds an invisible text layer underneath. The page looks exactly the same, but now Ctrl+F finds words in it, you can copy text, and search tools and screen readers can read it.
Getting accurate results
- Pick the document's language - recognition is noticeably better when it knows which alphabet and words to expect.
- Scan at 300 dpi, straight and evenly lit. Shadows, folds and angled phone photos are the main cause of errors.
- Recognition runs on your own device, so a long document takes a while on a phone and is much faster on a laptop.
Searchable PDF or editable Word?
This tool keeps the scan and makes it searchable - ideal for archives, invoices and records. If you need to edit the words, use PDF to Word with high-quality conversion, which runs OCR and returns an editable document. For the raw text only, the copy button here gives you everything that was recognised.
