May 11, 2026 · OCR PDF
How To OCR A Scanned PDF - Make Text Searchable
Scanned PDFs look like documents but behave like pictures. You can't search them, copy text from them, or feed them into any tool that expects real text. They're flat images dressed up as documents.
OCR PDF fixes that. Optical character recognition runs on every page, and an invisible text layer is overlaid behind the image. The PDF looks identical but is now searchable, selectable, and copyable.
How Accurate Is OCR
On clean printed text, accuracy is 98 percent or better. Modern OCR engines handle most fonts, sizes, and basic layouts reliably.
Handwriting drops accuracy sharply - OCR was designed for print, not script. Very low-resolution scans (below 200 DPI) also struggle. Forms and tables can be tricky because the engine sometimes confuses cell boundaries with letterforms.
We do not promise machine-readable accuracy on forms, tables, handwriting, or stylized fonts. For clean printed body text, expect search and copy to work as if the document were native text.
Supported Languages
Tesseract supports all major Latin-script languages out of the box: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, and more. CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) are also supported but add some processing time.
Pick the right language - running an English OCR pass on a Spanish document degrades accuracy substantially.
Will My Pages Look Different
No. The original image stays on top of the page. OCR adds an invisible text layer behind it so search and copy work. To a human eye, the PDF is unchanged. To a search index, it's now indexable.
How To OCR
Drop your scanned PDF into OCR PDF. Pick a language. Click. The file is processed on a Lambda worker running ocrmypdf with Tesseract.
After OCR, you can run any other text-aware tool on the result - PDF To Word, PDF To Excel, or feed it into your accounting or document-management system.
Turn scans into searchable documents with OCR PDF. Free up to 3 OCR runs per day.