PDF Make Searchable
Run OCR on scanned PDFs to make text selectable and searchable.
How to Use PDF Make Searchable
- 1Upload your scanned PDF using the drop zone.
- 2Select the primary language of the document from the language picker.
- 3Click 'Make Searchable' and wait while each page is processed with OCR.
- 4Once complete, download the searchable PDF.
- 5Open the result in any PDF viewer — you can now select, copy, and search text within the document.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'make searchable' mean?
A scanned PDF is essentially a collection of images with no machine-readable text. Making it searchable runs OCR (optical character recognition) to detect words in the images and embeds an invisible text layer behind each page. PDF viewers then allow you to search and select that text.
Will the PDF look different after processing?
No. The invisible text layer is added behind the existing page image, so the document looks identical. Only the searchability changes.
How accurate is the OCR?
Accuracy depends on the quality of the scan. Clean, high-resolution scans in a supported language typically achieve 95%+ accuracy. Low-resolution or handwritten documents will have lower accuracy.
Is my document uploaded to a server?
No. OCR runs entirely in your browser using Tesseract.js (a WebAssembly port of the Tesseract OCR engine). Your document stays on your device.
Why does it take a few minutes?
OCR is computationally intensive. Running it in the browser via WebAssembly is slower than a server-side process. A 10-page document typically takes 1–2 minutes depending on your device's speed.
About PDF Make Searchable
The PDF Make Searchable tool applies optical character recognition (OCR) to scanned documents, making the text within them selectable, copyable, and searchable — all without uploading your file to any server.
It uses Tesseract.js, a WebAssembly build of Google's Tesseract OCR engine, supporting 8 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and Simplified Chinese. Each page is rendered to a canvas element at high resolution, then Tesseract analyses the image to identify words and their positions.
The word positions are then used to draw invisible white text (opacity zero) on the corresponding positions of the original pdf-lib document pages. The result is a PDF that looks identical to the original but has a searchable text layer beneath the scanned image.
This tool is especially useful for digitising old printed documents, making scanned contracts and receipts searchable, and preparing documents for accessibility compliance.