OCR PDF (Make Searchable) - Free Online Browser Tool

Turn a scanned PDF into selectable, searchable text without uploading it anywhere.

A scan is a photograph of a page. The letters are pixels, so the text cannot be selected, searched or read aloud, and a reader with a screen reader gets nothing at all. This tool runs optical character recognition on the page and writes the recognised words back into the file as a real text layer, underneath the existing image. The page still looks exactly the same, but now the text can be selected, searched and copied. The recognition runs as WebAssembly inside this tab. The document is never sent anywhere, which is the difference from every hosted OCR tool — and for a medical record, a signed contract or anything under an NDA, that is the whole reason to use it here.

This ocr pdf (make searchable) utility runs completely inside your web browser. Your document is opened locally and processed on your own device using JavaScript and WebAssembly, so your file is never uploaded to any server. There is no signup, no watermark and no limit on how many documents you can handle.

  • 100% client-side - files never leave your device
  • Instant processing, no upload wait
  • Works on desktop, tablet and mobile
  • Free forever, no account required

Common next steps: Whiten Scanned Background & Clean Ink, PDF Text-to-Speech (Audio Reader), Search Text in PDF.

How to Use the OCR PDF (Make Searchable) Tool

Four steps, and the whole thing runs locally on your own device.

  1. Load the scanned PDF

    A scan has no text layer at all, which is how this tool recognises it. Nothing is uploaded when you drop it here.

  2. Choose the language

    Pick the language the document is written in. English works immediately; a new language downloads its model once and is cached after that.

  3. Choose which pages to read

    All pages, or only the pages that have no text layer. On a mixed document the second option skips the pages that already work and is much faster.

  4. Download the searchable PDF

    The recognised text is written invisibly over the original image, so the page looks unchanged and the text can now be selected, searched and copied.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is my document really never uploaded?

Yes. The page is rasterised by a WebAssembly module running in this tab, the text is recognised in the same tab, and the result is written in the same tab. No network request ever carries your file.

Will the scanned page look different afterwards?

No. The original image is untouched. The recognised words are written as invisible text over it, so the page is pixel-identical while the text becomes selectable. You can turn the invisible option off if you want to see what was read.

Why does it take so long?

OCR is genuinely heavy: each page has to be rendered at 200 or 300 DPI and then recognised word by word. The first run also downloads the engine and the language model. Both are cached, so later pages and later runs are faster.

What happens if the scan is bad?

Accuracy drops with poor input — a skewed page, motion blur, a low-contrast photocopy or handwriting. Tilted pages can be straightened first with Clean Scanned Page, and heavily degraded ones are better cleaned before recognition.

I only need the text, not a PDF. Do I still need this?

Use Extract Plain Text instead — it reads an existing text layer instantly. This tool exists for the pages that do not have one, and its output is a PDF that has gained one.