Make a scanned PDF searchable
A scanned document is a stack of photographs. Your computer can show it to you and nothing more: searching finds nothing, selecting selects nothing, and a screen reader has no idea there are words on the page at all. Optical character recognition reads the pictures and writes down what it sees. This tool renders each page, recognises the words with Tesseract, and lays an invisible copy of every word exactly over the printed one. Nothing about the page changes visually, because nothing about the page changes: your scan is returned as it was, with a text layer added on top. Afterwards you can search it, copy from it, and hand it to software that expects text. Recognition is very good and not perfect, so treat the result as a searchable copy rather than a transcript you would sign.
This tool runs on our servers. Your file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed in an isolated sandbox with no internet access, and deleted within two hours.
Drag your files here
How it works
Upload your scan
Drag the PDF onto the page or use the file picker. The upload goes straight to storage, not through our API.
Choose the language
Recognition is much more accurate when it knows which language it is reading. Pick the one the document is written in.
Download the searchable PDF
It looks identical. Open it and try your reader's search box.
Frequently asked questions
- Will my document look any different?
- No. The original pages are returned untouched and the recognised words are added as an invisible layer over them. Nothing is re-encoded, so the scan is exactly the scan you uploaded.
- How accurate is it?
- On a clean scan of ordinary printed text, very. Accuracy falls with low resolution, skewed pages, handwriting, unusual fonts and heavy background patterns. It is a searchable copy, not a transcript to rely on without reading.
- Which languages can it read?
- English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French. Choosing the right one matters: a French document read as English loses most of its accented words.
- My document is already text. Do I need this?
- No. If you can already search and select the words in your PDF, there is nothing for this tool to add. It is for pages that are pictures.
- How long do you keep my file?
- Your upload and the result are both deleted within two hours of the job finishing. Recognition happens in a container with no internet access.