How to make a scanned PDF searchable
A scanned PDF is a photograph of paper. You can read it, but your computer cannot: Ctrl+F finds nothing, you cannot copy a sentence out of it, and tools that work with text — converting to Word, summarizing, redacting by search — have nothing to work with. OCR, optical character recognition, reads the words in the picture and adds them to the file as real text. It runs on your own device, and the file is not uploaded.
Steps
Check whether your PDF needs it
Open the PDF and try to highlight a sentence with your mouse, or press Ctrl+F and search for a word you can see. If the text highlights and the search finds it, the PDF already has text and does not need OCR. If nothing highlights, the page is a picture — that is what OCR is for.
Choose the PDF and its language
Open OCR PDF and choose the file. Then pick the language the document is written in: English, Filipino, or both for documents that mix the two, as many forms and letters here do. Reading with the right language is what makes words like "pagpapaupa" come out right instead of as a near miss. Leave "Leave pages that already have text" on unless you have a reason not to.
Run OCR and wait for it to read each page
Press Make searchable. The first time, your browser downloads the recognition engine from this site — about 9 MB, plus 2.5 MB for Filipino — and keeps it, so later runs start straight away. Each page then takes a few seconds; a long document on a phone takes a while, and the bar shows how far it has got.
Download it and test the text
The PDF you download looks exactly like the one you chose: the words are added invisibly on top of the scan. Search it with Ctrl+F for a name or a number from the page, and copy a paragraph out to see how well it was read. From here it can go straight into PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, the AI Summarizer or Redact.
Common questions
Will my PDF look different?
No. The scan is left exactly as it was — not re-compressed, cleaned up or straightened — and the recognised text sits invisibly over it, lined up with the words in the image. That is also why the file does not get smaller.
How accurate is it?
On a clean, straight scan of printed text, nearly every word comes out right. Accuracy drops with blur, shadows, a crooked or low-resolution scan, very small print, and unusual fonts. Always check names, dates and amounts before relying on them — a 0 read as an O is the kind of mistake OCR makes.
Can it read handwriting?
Not reliably. It is made for printed text. Neat block capitals are sometimes read, but handwriting in general comes out wrong or not at all.
My page was scanned sideways. Will it work?
If the PDF displays the page upright, yes — the page is read the way it is shown. If the page itself shows sideways, turn it upright with Rotate PDF first and then run OCR; text on its side is not read.
Can I OCR photos instead of a PDF?
Put the photos into a PDF first with Images to PDF, or capture the pages with Scan to PDF, then run that PDF through OCR.
Is my document uploaded?
No. The pages are read in your browser, and the recognition engine is downloaded from this site, not from anyone else. Nothing about your document leaves your device.