PDF to Searchable

A scanned PDF is effectively a stack of images, so its words cannot be selected or searched. A searchable PDF adds an invisible text layer over those scans, letting you highlight text, find phrases with Ctrl+F, copy passages, and have search engines and screen readers read the content, all while the visible page looks unchanged.

No. The OCR text is drawn onto the page in a fully transparent style, so the visual appearance is identical to the original scan. The only difference is that text underneath the surface becomes selectable and searchable.

Accuracy depends on the quality of the scan and the clarity of the font, as well as the language you select. Clean, straight, high-contrast pages OCR best. Minor misreads are possible, but the text layer is still searchable and much better than nothing on a scanned document.

No. OCR runs locally in your browser using Tesseract, and the invisible text layer is added on-device with pdf-lib. Your PDF and the resulting searchable file both stay in memory on your machine, so confidential scans remain private.

The same in-browser language models as the other OCR tools: English, Nepali, Hindi, German, French, and Spanish, plus an auto option that probes the text and picks the best match. Choose the language that matches your document for the strongest results.