OCR PDF — Make Scanned PDFs Searchable Without Uploading

Extract selectable, searchable text from scanned documents, fully client-side.

PDF OCR Reader rasterizes each page at 300 DPI, straightens and cleans up that image, then runs an on-device OCR engine against it and stitches the recognized words back into an invisible text layer over the original scan. What you download looks exactly like the scan you started with, but every word in it becomes selectable and searchable, which is a different — and more durable — result than a plain text export.

How to OCR a PDF

Drop a scanned PDF onto the upload zone, or click it to pick one; the tool opens PDF files only.
Leave the OCR language on English, the only trained-data pack bundled today, and click Run OCR.
Wait while each page is rendered at 300 DPI, deskewed, cleaned up and split into columns before recognition; the progress bar names the page and column being read.
Skim the extracted text preview under the settings for misread names or figures.
Click Download searchable PDF to save a copy that looks identical to the scan but has selectable, searchable text.

What OCR does and when you need it

A PDF produced by a scanner or a phone camera app usually stores each page as a single photograph of paper. You can see the words, but your computer can't: dragging across a line selects nothing or the whole page at once, Ctrl+F finds no match for text that is plainly visible, and a screen reader has nothing to speak.

Optical character recognition reads that picture and works out which letters it shows. This tool then tucks the recognized words behind the page image as a hidden layer, so search, copy and assistive technology start working while the page keeps its original scanned look.

The cleanup pass before recognition even starts

Every page is converted to grayscale, then checked for skew by testing candidate rotation angles across a bounded plus-or-minus seven degree range in half-degree steps against a downsampled copy of the page, picking whichever angle produces the sharpest horizontal text-line alignment. The page is then binarized — reduced to pure black ink against a pure white background — using a local, per-pixel threshold rather than one fixed cutoff for the whole page, which holds up much better against scans with uneven lighting or a slightly gray background.

Pages that read as multiple columns are split into separate vertical strips at whitespace gaps wide enough to be a real column boundary, so the recognition engine reads down one column at a time instead of jumping across the full page width and scrambling the reading order of a two-column layout.

Why the result is a searchable PDF, not extracted text

The original page raster stays exactly as it was, painted as the visible background of the output page. What gets added on top is a text layer set to zero opacity — present for search, copy, and screen readers, invisible to the eye — with every recognized word positioned using its own measured box, mapped back through the deskew correction into the original page's coordinate space. That positioning is why selecting a line of text in the output highlights the right words on the visible scan instead of drifting off to one side.

Language coverage right now

Only English recognition data ships with this build today. Every asset the recognition engine needs — its own worker script, WebAssembly core, and trained-data file — is hosted on this app's own server rather than fetched from a third-party CDN, so recognition keeps working with no outbound request once the page and its assets have loaded, and no page image or recognized text ever leaves your device.

Each run handles one PDF, and OCR is never paywalled: the free tier sets no page limit on it, and the 10-documents-per-batch allowance that covers OCR is far more than a single run ever uses.

Have a photo or JPG instead of a PDF?

Photos of pages, JPGs saved by a scanner app and PNG screenshots won't open here, because the reader only loads PDF files. Turn them into a PDF with the Images ↔ PDF Converter first, where each image becomes a page shaped like the picture, then drop that PDF into this tool to give it a text layer.

How accurate this actually is

The deskew and column-splitting steps are lightweight heuristics — a bounded-angle search and a whitespace-gap detector — not a full geometric transform or a trained layout model, so they help typical scanned documents without pulling in a much heavier dependency.
Dense multi-column academic layouts, handwriting, and heavily degraded or low-contrast scans are where accuracy drops the most; a cloud OCR service with a learned layout model will generally outperform this pipeline on exactly those cases.
The 300 DPI rasterization resolution is fixed rather than user-adjustable, since the whole pipeline — from deskew to recognition — was tuned against that one resolution.
Verify names, numbers, and dates in the recognized text against the visible scan before relying on it for anything where a misread character matters.

Questions people ask about PDF OCR Reader

What is OCR?: OCR, short for optical character recognition, is software that looks at an image of text and decides which letters it contains. Here the open-source Tesseract engine does that job inside your browser tab, and the recognized words are written into your PDF as an invisible, searchable layer.
What languages can this OCR tool recognize?: English only, for now. The recognition engine supports adding other languages, but each one needs its own trained-data file bundled with the app first, and currently only English's file ships, so other languages aren't selectable in the language dropdown yet.
Can I copy text from a scanned PDF after OCR?: Yes. Open the downloaded copy in any PDF viewer and select text the usual way; each word sits directly over its image on the page. What you copy is exactly what the engine recognized, so proofread names and numbers, since a misread character gets copied along with everything else.
Can I turn a scanned PDF into an editable Word document?: Not with this tool alone, which only outputs a searchable PDF. The Document Converter, currently in beta, builds DOCX files from a PDF's text layer and tells you to OCR a scan here first; it then rebuilds paragraphs from the recognized words, though the scanned images and exact layout don't carry over into the Word file.
Which file formats can I OCR?: PDF in, PDF out. The file picker accepts .pdf only, so JPG, PNG and other photos have to be combined into a PDF first. There's no separate plain-text or PDF/A download, although the extracted text preview shown after a run can be selected and copied.
Does the OCR replace my scanned image with plain text?: No — the output keeps your original scanned page exactly as it looked, as the visible background image, and adds an invisible text layer positioned over it. You get a searchable, copy-pasteable PDF that still looks like the scan you started with, not a stripped-down text file.
Why is the recognized text sometimes wrong or jumbled?: The preprocessing that straightens and splits a page into columns uses bounded, lightweight heuristics rather than a full layout model, so dense multi-column pages, handwriting, and low-contrast or skewed scans are the cases most likely to produce misreads — always check important text against the visible scan.
Is OCR free?: Yes. Recognition runs on your own processor, so there's no per-page server cost to pass on, and OCR has no page limit, watermark or sign-up on the free tier. Each run takes one PDF; start another run for the next document.
Is my scanned document uploaded to run OCR?: No. Rasterization, preprocessing, and the recognition engine itself all run inside your browser using self-hosted assets; no page image, recognized text, or file content is sent to a server at any point in the process.

Related tools on BrakeTools

Images ↔ PDF Converter — Combine images into a PDF, or split a PDF back into individual images — either direction, entirely on-device.
PDF Compressor — Compress large scanned PDFs entirely on your device — no upload, no size cap.
PII Redactor — Permanently black out SSNs, bank details, and names in a PDF — burned into the pixels, never an overlay.

Content reviewed 2026-09-27.