How to Make a Scanned PDF Searchable (Free OCR)
A scanned PDF is only pictures of pages. Add a hidden text layer so you can search it and copy text, free, in your browser and without uploading the file.
Why scanned PDFs are not searchable
When you scan a paper document, the PDF contains an image of each page, not real text. That is why Ctrl+F finds nothing and you cannot select words. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the images and recovers the text.
How to make it searchable
Open the OCR PDF tool and drop in your scanned PDF. Pick the language the document is written in, click Make searchable, wait while each page is read, then download the result. The tool keeps every page looking exactly as scanned and places the recognized text invisibly behind it.
Your file stays on your device
Recognition happens in your browser, so the PDF is not uploaded. The first time you use a language, a small language model is downloaded once and then reused.
Tips for better results
Clean, straight, high-resolution scans work best, and choosing the right language matters. Very faint, skewed or handwritten pages are read less reliably. Words the engine is not confident about are left out of the text layer rather than guessed.
File size
Because pages are re-rendered as images, the searchable file can be larger than the original. If it is too big to send, run it through the Compress PDF tool afterwards.
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