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Searchable PDF Converter (OCR)

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.

Searchable PDF Converter (OCR) Runs locally

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
Step by step

How to use it

  1. Select the language the document is written in — this strongly affects accuracy.

  2. Drop a scanned PDF onto the drop zone, or click it to browse.

  3. Watch per-page progress as each page is recognized and its invisible text layer is written.

  4. Download the resulting '-searchable.pdf' file, open it, and try selecting text or searching with Ctrl/Cmd+F.

When to use it

Use cases

  • Make a scanned contract or report searchable so you can Ctrl+F names, dates, and clauses.

  • Turn phone-scanned documents into PDFs you can copy quotes from.

  • Prepare scanned archives so document viewers and desktop search can index their content.

  • Keep the original look of a signed or stamped document while making its text selectable.

Limits & privacy

What this tool does and does not do

Private by design

The PDF is opened, recognized, and rewritten entirely on your device. It is never uploaded to a server. Only the OCR engine and language data files are downloaded, and they are cached for later runs.

  • OCR is probabilistic: the invisible layer contains whatever was recognized, so copied text may include recognition errors — proofread what you paste.

  • Selection highlights follow OCR bounding boxes and may not align pixel-perfectly with the printed glyphs.

  • Limited to Latin-alphabet languages; words with characters outside the Latin-1 set are skipped.

  • Limited to 50 pages per run — split longer PDFs first.

  • Password-protected, corrupted, or rotated-page PDFs may fail or misalign.

  • The engine and language data (a few megabytes) are downloaded on first use.

Background

The invisible text layer

A searchable PDF keeps the scanned page image exactly as it is and adds recognised text behind it in an invisible rendering mode. You see the original scan; your reader's search finds the text underneath.

This is the right output for archives precisely because it is additive. The scan is not replaced by a transcription, so nothing is lost if recognition made mistakes — and it will make some. The visual record stays authoritative while the text layer makes the document findable.

Recognition runs on Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly, executing in a worker thread inside your browser. The first run downloads the trained data for the language you picked and caches it, so the initial recognition is noticeably slower than every one after it. No image is uploaded — the engine comes to the file rather than the file going to a server.

Expect the file to grow. You are keeping every original page image and adding a text layer on top, so a searchable PDF is always somewhat larger than the scan it came from.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Is the Searchable PDF Converter free to use?

Yes. The tool is free and runs directly in your browser with no account required.

Does this tool upload my PDF?

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.

How is this different from the PDF OCR tool?

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.

Will the PDF look different afterwards?

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.

Why is text selection slightly offset or imperfect?

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.

Why does it support fewer languages than the other OCR tools?

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.

Does it work on a PDF that already has selectable text?

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.

How many pages can it handle?

Up to 50 pages per run, to keep memory use reasonable. For longer documents, split the PDF first and process each part.

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