Free tool · No upload
Make a scanned PDF searchable
Scans and photos become PDFs you can search, select and copy from. The recognised text is laid invisibly over each page, so the file looks exactly the same. Recognition runs on your device; the document never leaves it.
Pro feature3 pages a day free · Pro has no limit
For pages that mix English with the chosen language.
Leave empty for every page, or list pages like 1-3, 7.
Add a file to begin.
How to make a scanned PDF searchable
- 1
Add the scanned PDF and choose its main language.
- 2
Press Recognise text. The first run in a language downloads its data once; later runs work offline.
- 3
Download the searchable PDF, or keep editing it in PdfNib.
Your PDF stays on your device
Most online PDF tools send your file to a server. This one runs in your browser instead, so there is nothing to delete later and nothing to leak.
- Works offline. Load the page, turn off the internet, and it still works.
- No account, no watermark. The result is yours, with nothing added.
Frequently asked questions
- Is my scan uploaded for recognition?
- No. Recognition runs in your browser with Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly. The only download is the language data itself, a few megabytes per language, fetched once from a public CDN and then kept on your device. The document never leaves it.
- Which languages does it read?
- Over 100, including Bangla, Hindi, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and every major European language. Choose the main language of the document and tick Also recognise English for mixed pages.
- How accurate is it?
- Clear scans at 200 to 300 dpi with straight, dark text read very well. Blurry photos, handwriting and skewed pages read worse. The visible page is never changed, so a poor result costs nothing: only the invisible text has mistakes.
- How much is free?
- Three pages a day, with no account. Pro removes the limit.
- Can I recognise text in a photo or JPG?
- Turn it into a PDF first with the Image to PDF tool, then run OCR on that.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes, once a language's data has been downloaded on this device. The engine itself is cached the first time you use it.