OCR a PDF — make scanned PDFs searchable

Turn scans into searchable text

A scanned page looks like text, but to a computer it's just a picture — you can't select, copy or search any of it. PDFEzy's free OCR PDF tool fixes that. Optical character recognition reads the letters inside each image and rebuilds them as real, selectable text, so a flat scan becomes a document you can search, copy from and index. It's invaluable for scanned contracts, receipts, invoices, forms and old books you want to make usable again.

Everything runs on your device using the Tesseract recognition engine, so your scans are processed locally and never uploaded — even sensitive paperwork stays completely private. When it's done you get two downloads: a searchable PDF that looks identical to the original, plus a plain text file of everything that was recognized.

OCR is detailed work, so expect it to take a moment per page, and note that English is recognized today. Once your scan is searchable, send it to PDF to Word to keep editing the text, or open it in View PDF to read and search it straight away.

Why OCR PDFs in your browser?

• Private by design: recognition runs on-device, so your scans never leave your computer or phone.
• Genuinely searchable: the output is real text you can select, copy and search, not just an image.
• Two useful outputs: get both a searchable PDF and a plain text file of the recognized content.