OCR for Scanned PDFs: Make Any Document Searchable
Turn scans and photos into searchable, copy-pasteable PDFs with browser-based OCR — no upload required.
A scanned PDF is a bag of images pretending to be a document. OCR (optical character recognition) turns that bag into real, searchable, copy-pasteable text — while keeping the original layout intact.
What OCR actually does
OCR runs a trained model over each page image, recognizes glyph shapes as characters, groups them into words and lines, and writes an invisible text layer behind the original image. The page looks identical; Cmd+F now works.
Accuracy depends on the input
- • 300 DPI clean scan of printed text → 99%+ accuracy.
- • 150 DPI scan → 95% typical.
- • Photo of a page taken on a phone → 85–95% depending on lighting.
- • Handwriting → 60–90% with specialized models, less with generic OCR.
Languages and scripts
Tesseract 5 supports 100+ languages including CJK, Arabic, and Cyrillic. For mixed-language documents, pass multiple language codes so the OCR engine doesn't misread Cyrillic as Latin.
Client-side OCR is real now
WebAssembly builds of Tesseract run at near-native speed in your browser. Be My PDF's OCR tool processes a 50-page scanned PDF in under a minute on a modern laptop — with no upload. Combine with PDF to Word to get an editable document.
Frequently asked questions
Keep reading
Ready to try it?
Free forever. No signup. 100% in-browser — your document never leaves your device.
OCR a scanned PDF →