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Scanned PDFs are photographs of pages: you can't search them, select text, or convert them to Word. This tool runs OCR (optical character recognition) over each scanned page and embeds the recognised text as an invisible layer underneath the image — the document looks exactly the same, but suddenly behaves like a real PDF. Pages that already contain text are left untouched, so mixed documents are safe.
It's built on OCRmyPDF and Tesseract, the open-source standard for exactly this job. English, Spanish, French and German are supported. Files are processed on our server in memory and deleted immediately.
Frequently asked questions
Will OCR change how my PDF looks?
No — the scanned images stay exactly as they are. The recognised text sits in an invisible layer beneath them, which is what makes search, selection and copy work without altering appearance.
How accurate is the text recognition?
On clean scans of printed text, typically 95%+ accurate. Quality drops with skewed, low-resolution or stained pages, and handwriting is largely out of scope. The text layer is for search and copy — proofread before relying on it verbatim.
Can I convert a scanned PDF to Word after this?
Yes — that's the intended pipeline: run the scan through OCR here, then feed the searchable result to our PDF to Word tool to get an editable document.