OCR a scanned PDF.

Turn pictures of text into searchable, selectable text — recognized entirely in your browser. Your document is never uploaded.

Your document is never uploaded — the only download is the OCR engine itself, to your browser.

How in-browser OCR works

  1. Select the scanned PDF — and pick the language it's written in — recognition quality depends on it.
  2. Each page is recognized locally — the Tesseract OCR engine runs as WebAssembly inside your browser tab, reading the page images one by one.
  3. Download the searchable PDF — pages look identical, but now carry an invisible text layer — you can search, select, and copy the text.

One honest disclosure most tools skip: the OCR engine and language model (about 15 MB) are downloaded to your browser on first use. That is the only network activity — your document itself never leaves your device. It runs on the same in-browser engine as our PDF merger, PDF splitter, and PDF to Markdown converter — the file never leaves your machine.

OCR, honestly answered

No. Recognition runs inside your browser via WebAssembly. The one network request this tool makes is downloading the OCR engine and language model (~15 MB) to your device on first use — stated plainly because scanned documents are often the most sensitive ones.
In two steps, yes: run it through this OCR first so the pages gain a real text layer, then use our Edit PDF or PDF to Word tool on the result. A scan without OCR is just a picture — no editor can honestly edit it directly.
Good on clean scans of printed text; weaker on low-resolution scans, handwriting, and complex layouts. It's the open-source Tesseract engine — the same one many paid tools wrap. No tool honestly promises perfect OCR.
English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Arabic, and simplified Chinese in the picker. Pick the document's language before running — it matters.
No — pages keep their scanned appearance. The text layer is invisible, sitting under the image so search and copy-paste work.
Because the recognition genuinely runs on your device rather than a server farm — a few seconds per page. That's the privacy trade, stated honestly.
Still something on your mind? Try it yourself — it's free

Ready to fall in love with PDFs again?

Free, no account — and your files never leave your device.

Try PDFLove AI — It's Free →

Coming soon · Premium

Take every tool offline — native apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS & Android.

  • Every tool on this site, running natively on your device
  • Fully offline — files never even touch a browser tab
  • Batch-process whole folders of documents locally

The native apps will be a one-time paid upgrade when they launch — everything in the browser stays free, always.