OCR PDF
Make your scanned PDF searchable — Ctrl+F and copy text work instantly.
Drop your scanned PDF here
or click to choose a file
Your file never leaves your browser — processed locally, nothing uploaded
Make your scanned PDF searchable — Ctrl+F and copy text work instantly.
A scanned PDF is just an image — Ctrl+F returns nothing, you can't highlight a word, and copying text is impossible. PDFree fixes this in under two minutes by adding an invisible text layer directly on top of your scanned pages. The result: a fully searchable, copy-able PDF that looks exactly like the original.
Everything runs inside your browser. Your scanned document is never uploaded to any server — not even for a moment.
Drag onto the page above or click Choose PDF. Hybrid PDFs (some text pages + some scanned pages) are handled automatically — PDFree checks each page individually.
Click Install OCR Engine — this downloads Tesseract.js once (~17 MB) and caches it in your browser. After that, every future scanned PDF you process works offline with no download needed.
Pick the language of the text in your scanned document. PDFree supports 18 languages including Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, and all major European languages. For auto-detection, click Detect language.
Click Make PDF Searchable. Your PDF downloads automatically. Open in any PDF reader and press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) — search works instantly. Text selection and copy also work.
When a document is scanned, the scanner takes a photo of the page and saves it as an image inside a PDF container. There is no actual text data — only pixels arranged to look like letters. PDF readers display the image faithfully but have no text to search through.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) solves this. It analyses the pixel patterns in the image, identifies letters and words, and records their positions in the file as a text layer. The image stays unchanged — the text layer is invisible but fully accessible for search and copy. This is the standard format for searchable PDFs in archives, legal systems, and document management software.
After processing, PDFree shows a quality score (Excellent / Good / Fair / Poor) based on Tesseract's word confidence per page. The main factors:
No. The original scanned images are preserved exactly as they were. Only an invisible text layer is added on top. Open the result in any PDF reader — visually it is identical to the original.
No file size limit and no page limit on desktop browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari on Mac). On iOS and iPadOS, processing is capped at 30 pages to stay within browser memory limits — use Split PDF first to process a large document in sections.
Around 2–5 seconds per page on a modern device. A 10-page scanned document typically finishes in under a minute. PDFree shows an estimated time remaining starting from page 2 so you always know how long is left.
Yes. PDFs exported from CamScanner, Microsoft Lens, Adobe Scan, and similar mobile scanning apps are image-only PDFs — exactly what PDFree is designed for. Drop the PDF, select your language, and click Make PDF Searchable.
Yes. Enable "Also download .txt copy" in the OCR options to get both a searchable PDF and a plain text file at the same time. The .txt file contains all extracted text with page separators — useful for pasting into Word, Google Docs, or any text editor.