How to Make a Scanned PDF Searchable With OCR
Updated October 9, 2026
When you scan a paper or take a photo of it, the PDF only contains pictures. You cannot search the words, copy a sentence, or convert it to Word. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the pictures and finds the letters, so the document becomes searchable.
Run OCR in 4 steps
- Open the OCR PDF tool and choose your scanned PDF.
- Choose the language of the document. The correct language makes a big difference to accuracy.
- Press Run OCR. The tool shows its progress page by page. The first time, it also downloads the language data, so it can take a minute before the first page starts.
- Download the results.
What you receive
- searchable.pdf looks like your original scan, but you can now search it and select its text.
- text.txt contains all the recognized text, ready to copy into Word or an email.
How to get the best accuracy
- Scan at 300 DPI or higher, and keep the page straight. A tilted page gives more mistakes.
- Use even light, without shadows or fingers over the text.
- Choose black and white or grayscale for plain text documents. The Scan to PDF tool can clean up photos of documents before OCR.
- Check numbers carefully, such as amounts, dates and ID numbers. OCR can confuse similar characters, like 0 and O or 1 and l.
Good to know
- Long documents take longer, because every page is analyzed in your browser. For a big file, split it into smaller parts first.
- Printed text works best. Handwriting is usually not recognized well.
- The tool supports several languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Arabic and Hindi.
Frequently asked questions
Are my documents uploaded? Your pages are analyzed in your browser. Only the language data is downloaded.
Why is the output PDF bigger? The tool saves each page as a picture together with the hidden text. Use Compress PDF afterward if you need a smaller file.
What do I do with the text? Copy it from text.txt, or turn the result into a Word file with the PDF to Word tool.