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OCR PDF

Recognize scanned document text and produce a searchable, selectable text layer.

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Step-by-Step Guide

How to use OCR PDF

1

Upload your PDF

1/5

Select the scanned or image-based PDF you want to make searchable.

2

Select language

2/5

Choose the primary language of the document for best recognition accuracy.

3

Choose accuracy level

3/5

Select Fast for quick results or High Accuracy for complex documents.

4

Run OCR

4/5

Click "Run OCR". Text recognition runs on each page and a text layer is generated.

5

Download

5/5

Save the searchable PDF with the embedded text layer.

Best Practices

Pro Tips

Tip 1

Higher DPI rendering (200+ DPI) produces better OCR accuracy, especially for small text and handwriting.

Tip 2

Documents with clean, high-contrast printed text at 300+ DPI original scan resolution achieve the best results.

Tip 3

Handwritten text and stylised fonts may produce poor results — manual correction may be needed.

Tip 4

For multilingual documents, select the most predominant language for best overall accuracy.

Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

OCR is designed for image-based or scanned PDFs. PDFs already containing a text layer do not need OCR — use Extract Text instead.

Tesseract.js supports over 100 languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and many more.

Accuracy depends heavily on the source scan quality. Clean, high-resolution scans of printed text typically achieve 95–99% accuracy. Handwriting and poor-quality scans may be significantly lower.

Yes. The OCR text is added as an invisible overlay. The original page appearance is unchanged.

Processing time depends on page count and selected accuracy level. A 10-page document typically takes 15–60 seconds on a modern device.