OCR PDF

Make scanned PDFs searchable and selectable with OCR.

Coming soon

We're polishing this tool — read on to learn what it'll do, or try one of our working tools above.

OCR turns image-only PDFs (scans, photos of documents) into searchable, selectable text. Converterzilla's OCR engine will process every page, recognize the text, and embed it as an invisible layer over the existing image — so the document looks identical but you can now search, copy and select.

How OCR PDF will work once it ships

This tool isn't live yet — the steps below describe the planned experience, not something you can do today.

  1. Upload your scanned PDF. Drop a scan, photo-of-document, or image-only PDF. We accept up to several hundred pages per document.
  2. Pick OCR languages. Choose the languages present in the document (English by default; we support 100+ via Tesseract).
  3. Download the searchable PDF. We embed an invisible text layer over the original images. The PDF looks the same but text is now selectable.

What OCR PDF will offer

100+ languages

From English and Spanish to Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic — pick one or several at once for mixed-language docs.

Layout preserving

We add a text layer over the original scan, so the document looks identical to the source.

Works on photos too

Even photos of paper documents (taken on a phone) work — we handle perspective and lighting variations.

Questions we expect about OCR PDF

Reliable OCR needs server-side processing — Tesseract or similar. We're shipping the worker soon. For client-side use, we're investigating a WASM build.

95%+ on clean printed text. Lower on degraded scans, handwriting and unusual fonts.

Slightly — the invisible text layer adds a small amount of data, typically 5–15% of the original size.

Guides for OCR PDF

OCR explained: making scanned PDFs searchable

From image-of-text to searchable, selectable, copyable text — without losing the original look.