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Searchable OCR PDF
Add a searchable OCR text layer to scanned PDFs locally in your browser.
Your files stay on your device. Processing happens locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
How it works
- Select a scanned PDF — drag it into the drop zone or click to browse.
- Start the OCR run — every page is recognized on your device.
- Wait while the invisible text layer is placed over each scanned page.
- Download the searchable PDF and try selecting or searching the text.
Why local processing?
Searchable OCR PDF processes your file inside your browser, on your own device. Your document is not uploaded to our servers. The browser may download code needed to run the tool, but those requests do not contain your file.
Check it yourself: open your browser’s network tab while a file is being processed — your document never appears in any request.
Frequently asked questions
- Are my scans uploaded for the OCR?
- No. Recognition happens in your browser with Tesseract.js. In the network tab you may notice the OCR engine and its English model being fetched from this site on first use — your scanned pages, however, are never sent anywhere.
- How large can the scanned PDF be?
- Each file can be up to 200 MB. Processing happens in your browser and also depends on available memory. Large or complex files may be slow or exceed your device’s resources even below this limit.
- Can I make GDPR-sensitive scans searchable here?
- The entire pipeline — rasterizing, recognizing, rebuilding the PDF — runs on your device. No server-side processing means the scan and its recognized text never exist anywhere but on your machine.
- What exactly does the tool add to my PDF?
- An invisible text layer aligned over each scanned page. The page still looks like the original scan, but you can now search, select, and copy the recognized words.
- Which languages can it recognize?
- English only in this first version, and recognition accuracy depends on scan quality — clean, high-resolution scans give the best text layer. Proofread before relying on it.
- Does the output keep my original pages?
- The output is image-based: each page is the scanned image with text layered over it. It is built for searchability, not for restoring a born-digital document.
Related tools
- OCR PDF — Extract text from scanned PDFs, right in your browser.
- Scanned PDF to Word — Recognize text from scanned or image-only PDFs into an editable Word document.