OCR PDF
OCR PDF runs Tesseract over each scanned page and adds an invisible text layer behind the image, making the document searchable and its text selectable without changing how it looks.
About OCR PDF
A scan is a picture of a page. Your viewer can display it, but Ctrl+F finds nothing, you cannot copy a paragraph, and search indexes treat the document as empty. OCR fixes that by reading the shapes in the image and writing out the characters they represent. It is what turns an archive of scanned invoices, contracts or old reports into something you can actually search.
Two things worth knowing. The visible page is untouched — the recognised text sits behind it, invisible, so nothing about the layout changes. And accuracy tracks scan quality: a clean 300 dpi scan of printed text is close to perfect, while a skewed phone photo or faint fax will produce errors. Only the English language pack is installed here.
How to ocr pdf
- Select the scanned PDF you want to make searchable.
- Choose whether to skip pages that already contain a text layer.
- Click OCR PDF and wait while Tesseract reads each page.
- Download the searchable PDF and try a search inside it.
Why use this tool
Invisible text layer
Recognised characters are placed behind the original image at their true positions, so search and copy work while the page looks exactly as scanned.
Skips existing text
Pages that already carry a text layer are left alone by default, which avoids duplicating text and keeps processing time down on mixed documents.
Runs on our server
Tesseract does the work here, so there is no software to install and it behaves the same on a phone as on a desktop.