Searchable PDF Converter turns a scanned PDF into one whose text you can select, copy, and search with Ctrl+F. Each page is recognized by the Tesseract OCR engine in your browser, and the recognized words are written back into the same PDF as an invisible text layer positioned over the scanned image — the document looks identical, but behaves like a digital PDF. The file never leaves your device.
Pick the language the document is written in — it strongly affects accuracy.
Drop a scanned PDF here, or click to browse
You get the same PDF back with selectable, searchable text — processed locally, up to 50 pages
Yes. The tool is free and runs directly in your browser with no account required.
No. Pages are rendered, recognized by the Tesseract OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly, and rewritten with pdf-lib — all inside your browser tab. Your document never leaves your device.
PDF OCR extracts the text out of the document as a .txt result. This tool writes the recognized words back into the PDF, invisibly, at the position where they appear on the scan — so the visible document is unchanged but you can select, copy, and Ctrl+F it like a digital PDF.
No. The scanned page images are untouched; the text layer is drawn with zero opacity on top of them. Only the file size grows slightly.
The invisible words are placed using the OCR engine's bounding boxes, which approximate — not exactly match — the printed glyphs. Selection and search work well, but highlights may not align pixel-perfectly with the scan.
The invisible layer uses a standard PDF font limited to the Latin-1 character set. Languages that need other scripts or letters outside that set (Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Turkish) can't be encoded reliably, so they are not offered here — use the PDF OCR tool to extract their text instead.
It will add a second OCR layer on top, which usually duplicates text in searches. For digital PDFs there's nothing to gain — this tool is for scans and image-only PDFs.
Up to 50 pages per run, to keep memory use reasonable. For longer documents, split the PDF first and process each part.
