Make a scanned PDF searchable
Turn a photograph of a page into a document you can search and copy from, without changing how it looks.
- 1Add a scanned PDF.
- 2Choose the document language.
- 3Download the searchable PDF.
Good things start with a file.
Drop PDFs or images here, or choose from your device.
Rendering page previews…
This PDF looks password-protected, so we can't show page previews here. Type the page numbers instead, or unlock it first.
Add at least two PDFs to merge.
This tool is still in development. You can arrange files locally; nothing is uploaded until it opens.
Files are uploaded over an encrypted, single-use link, processed on our own servers and deleted within one hour.
Need a different tool?
Try “merge”, “JPG to PDF” or “sign”. We list PDF tools we are building, not every format pair.
Looks identical
The scan stays exactly as it is. Recognised text is added as an invisible layer underneath, which is what makes search and copy work.
Ten languages
English, Slovenian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Croatian, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish, singly or two at once. Picking the right language is the biggest quality lever.
Straightened and rotated
Skewed scans are deskewed and sideways pages rotated automatically before recognition.
Make a scanned PDF searchable: what to expect
A scanner produces pictures. Your computer cannot search a picture, and neither can a screen reader. OCR reads the picture and writes what it finds as invisible text on top, so the page still looks like the scan but behaves like a document.
We run Tesseract, the open-source engine behind many document systems, with pages pre-processed for skew and rotation. Clean office scans at 300 DPI recognise very well. Faxes, handwriting, low-resolution photos and decorative fonts recognise poorly, and no OCR engine changes that.
Pages that already contain text are skipped, so running OCR on a mixed document is safe. Output is PDF/A, which also makes the file suitable for long-term archiving.
Questions, answered
- Will the scan look different?
- No. The image is preserved; text is added invisibly.
- How accurate is it?
- Very good on clean 300 DPI scans in the right language. Poor on handwriting, faxes and low-resolution photos.
- Can I edit the text afterwards?
- You can search and copy it. For editing, run the result through PDF to text or, later, PDF to Word.
- Which language should I pick?
- The language of the document. Two languages at once cost accuracy slightly, so use that only for genuinely mixed pages.
- Is my document sent to a cloud OCR service?
- No. Recognition runs on our own servers in an isolated process with no network access.