Make a scanned PDF searchable (OCR)

How it works

Drop a scanned PDF, tick English, Hindi or both, and press Make searchable. Each page is read by Tesseract, the open-source text-recognition engine, running inside your browser. An invisible layer of the words it finds is placed exactly over the picture of the page, so you can search with Ctrl F, select a line and copy it, and other apps can index the file. The copy is saved with "-searchable" added to the name. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and there is no page limit.

Your scan stays exactly as it was

Many OCR tools rebuild the pages and quietly lower the image quality. Here the original page pictures are not touched at all — the text layer is added on top, and you only ever see the scan. Pages that already contain real text, like a typed page in a mixed file, are left completely alone.

English and Hindi

Tick the languages that appear in the document. Hindi reading uses its own language data, so ticking both on a mixed document — a government letter, a land record, a college certificate — reads both scripts. Hindi words are stored as proper Unicode, so a search for सरकार finds them.

The first run downloads the reader once

The text reader and its English data are about 7 MB, with Hindi about 1.4 MB more. They come from our own site the first time you press the button — never from a third-party server — and your browser keeps them, so later documents start quickly and the tool even works offline.

Speed and accuracy

Reading takes a few seconds per page on a computer and longer on a phone, so big files are best done on a laptop. Clear, straight scans read best. OCR can misread a few characters, especially in faint copies or handwriting, so check names, amounts and ID numbers before you rely on them. A page scanned sideways should be turned first with Organize PDF.

When people use it

Scanned bank statements and salary slips you need to search, old certificates and mark sheets, court papers and land records, contracts that arrived as photocopies, and study notes you want to copy quotes from.

Good companions

Made the scan with your phone camera? Scan to PDF cleans it up first. Need the file smaller for a portal? Compress PDF. If the PDF has a password, Unlock PDF removes it first.

Privacy

Your document is read only on your device. It is never sent to us or anyone else.