Searchable PDF / OCR
Work with your PDF directly in the browser—fast, private, and without uploading the document.
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Privacy & limitations
Your files stay on this device
OCR accuracy depends on scan quality, typeface legibility, and language-pack coverage; handwriting, very low-contrast scans, and highly decorated pages are recognized poorly. The invisible text overlay is best-effort alignment, not pixel-perfect — text selection and copy may snap to boxes that are slightly offset, especially near margins and in multi-column layouts. OCR runs entirely on your device, so very large or many-page documents can take a long time, and memory use scales with page size and DPI (a 600-DPI letter page is roughly 8 MB of pixel data per page). The searchable overlay uses PDF standard fonts, which only cover Latin-1 scripts. Words in scripts such as Devanagari (Hindi) are recognized and counted, but their text runs are skipped because they cannot be encoded in the standard font — they will not be searchable/selectable. Pages that carry a rotation in the PDF itself (for example a landscape page inside a portrait document) get an overlay aligned to the rotated view, where placement is approximate.
How to use this tool
- Add a scanned or image-based PDF using the file picker or drag-and-drop — no need to check whether it is 'real' text first.
- Choose which pages to OCR and the language of the text on those pages. The first time you pick a language, its pack downloads on-device with visible progress; after that it works fully offline.
- Pick a rendering resolution: 300 DPI is the recommended default for printed text, 600 DPI helps with very small print, and 150/72 DPI are faster drafts. Keep deskew, grayscale, and contrast-boost on for typical scans, and turn them off for already-clean documents to save time.
- Set a confidence threshold (60% by default). After the run, the summary shows how many recognized words fell below it, so you can review them in a follow-up pass.
- Download the result: your original pages are visually unchanged, but now carry an invisible searchable text layer you can select, copy, and find within.
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert a scanned PDF into editable text?
Upload the scanned PDF and run OCR — the tool recognizes text on each page locally using on-device OCR and adds an invisible, selectable text layer on top of the original scan, so the document looks the same but text becomes searchable and copyable.
Does OCR work on handwritten text?
OCR here is tuned for printed text; handwriting recognition accuracy is much lower and isn't a supported use case for this tool.