Make a Scanned PDF Searchable, Free — Right in Your Browser
Recognize the text on every page and embed it invisibly — the scan keeps looking exactly the same, but becomes searchable and its text becomes selectable and copyable, all without an account or your file ever touching a server.
Select a Scanned PDF →How it works
Select your scanned PDF
Select Make Searchable
Recognition runs in your browser
Download, now searchable
Why OCR locally matters
This editor
- Your file never leaves your device
- No account or email required
- No file size cap
- The scanned image is never altered, only enriched
Typical "upload to edit" tools
- Your scanned document sits on their server
- Usually requires an account
- Often capped on the free tier
- OCR often locked behind a paid tier
Frequently asked questions
What does "Make Searchable" actually do to my PDF?
It recognizes the text on each scanned page and embeds it invisibly on top of the existing image — the page looks exactly the same, but once downloaded, you can search it, and select and copy its text, in any PDF viewer.
Does OCR run on a server, or in my browser?
Entirely in your browser, using Tesseract.js. Your PDF itself is never uploaded anywhere. The one exception: the first time you use it, your browser downloads a small English recognition model over the network — that's a generic file, not anything from your document.
How accurate is the recognized text?
It depends heavily on scan quality — a clean, upright, high-contrast scan recognizes well; a skewed, blurry, or low-resolution one will recognize less reliably. Low- confidence words are left out rather than guessed at, so you get fewer words right rather than more words wrong.
Does this work for languages other than English?
Not yet — recognition is English-only for now.