How to make a scanned PDF searchable

Updated: 2026-10-26

You scanned a contract or a stack of receipts, and now Ctrl+F finds nothing and you can't copy a single line. That's because a scan is a picture of text, not text. OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that. Here's how to do it for free, without uploading the scan.

What a searchable PDF is

A searchable PDF looks exactly like your scan. The difference is an invisible layer of text placed over each page, word by word, where the printed words are. Your PDF reader uses that layer when you search, select or copy, so:

Find works: search for a name, an invoice number or a clause and jump straight to it.
Copy works: select a paragraph and paste it into an email or a document.
Other tools work: screen readers can read the page aloud, and tools that work with text, such as converting to Word or comparing versions, have something to read.

To check whether a PDF needs OCR, try selecting one word. If you can't, or a search finds nothing you can clearly see on the page, it's an image-only scan.

OCR a scanned PDF in your browser

Open OCR PDF and drop your scanned PDF on the page.
Under Language of the document, choose the language it's written in. If it mixes in English, for example a Spanish letter with English product names, check Also recognize English.
Keep Searchable PDF selected as the output format.
Click Recognize text. The status line counts the pages as they're read; expect a few seconds per page on a computer, longer on a phone.
Download the file. It has "-searchable" added to the name.

The first time you use a language, its recognition data (1–3 MB) is downloaded once. Only that data is downloaded: the recognition itself always runs on your device, and the scan is never sent anywhere. That matters for the documents people usually scan: IDs, medical letters, tax forms and signed contracts.

The result also tells you how many words were found, which is a quick sanity check. A full page of text should give a few hundred words.

What the tool takes care of

Mixed PDFs. Pages that already have real text are left exactly as they are, and only the scanned pages are recognized.
Sideways and upside-down pages. If a page was scanned the wrong way round, the tool notices, reads it upright and lines the text layer up with the page as it is.
Blank pages. Empty pages and the backs of single-sided sheets are skipped instead of producing junk text.
Protected files. If the PDF needs a password to open, type it in the box under the file name and click Unlock first.

Need a smaller file as well? Compress first, then OCR. Compress PDF turns each page into an image, which would remove a text layer added earlier.

Photos of documents, and plain text

OCR PDF also accepts photos (JPG, PNG and other common formats). Drop several at once and you get one searchable PDF, one page per photo, each sized to A4 in its own orientation.

If you only want the words, not a PDF, use Image to text or choose Text (.txt) as the output. You get a plain text file with the text of every page, ready to paste anywhere.

Getting accurate results

OCR is very good on clean printed text and less reliable on everything else. A few things make a real difference:

Scan at 300 DPI. It's the usual sweet spot for text. Very low resolutions blur small print.
Keep it straight and flat. For phone photos, shoot from directly above in even light, with no shadow across the page.
Pick the right language. Accented letters and other scripts are read far better with the matching language selected.
Don't expect handwriting. OCR is made for print. Neat block capitals may work; cursive usually doesn't.

Even on a good scan, OCR can confuse similar characters, like 0 and O or 1 and l. If you'll rely on numbers from the text, such as amounts or account numbers, check them against the page.

Other ways to OCR a PDF

Adobe Acrobat: the paid versions include text recognition that produces a searchable PDF. The free Acrobat Reader doesn't.
Google Drive: right-click the PDF and choose Open with > Google Docs. You get an editable Google Doc rather than a searchable PDF. The file is uploaded to Google, and Google's help page lists 2 MB as the size limit for this conversion.