A scanned contract, letter or receipt is just a picture of the pages: you cannot search it, copy a sentence or fix a typo. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the words in the scan and adds them as an invisible text layer, so the pages look exactly the same but the text works like in any other PDF.
Do it now in the free PDF editorOpens in your browser. No sign-up, no watermark — your PDF is never uploaded.
Open the PDF editor and choose your scanned PDF, or a photo of a document.
Click More in the toolbar and choose OCR: recognize text. Scanned pages without text are selected for you.
Choose the language of the document. Click pages to add or remove them, or type page numbers such as 1-3, 5.
Click Recognize text. When it is done, search with Find, change words with Edit text, and click Download to save the searchable PDF.
See how it works
1Click More in the toolbar
2Choose OCR: recognize text
1Scanned pages are selected for you
2Choose the document language
3Recognize text
1After OCR, Find searches the scan
2Matches line up with the printed words
3Download saves the searchable PDF
What you can do with a searchable PDF
Find any word with Ctrl+F, and highlight or redact every match in one step.
Select and copy text into an email, a spreadsheet or a document instead of retyping it.
Correct typos, names, dates and amounts with Edit text.
Search the saved file later in Adobe Acrobat, Preview, Chrome, Windows search or your document management system.
Tips for the best results
Scan at 300 dpi in grayscale or color. Lower resolutions lose detail in small letters.
Make sure the pages are upright. Rotate sideways or upside-down pages with Rotate left or Rotate right before running OCR.
Photos of documents work too: take them straight from above, in good light and without shadows.
Your edits are kept: text, signatures and highlights you added before OCR become part of the pages.
Need to remove confidential details from a scan? Run OCR first, then use Find and Redact all to black out every match for good.
Frequently asked questions
Is my scanned document uploaded for OCR?
No. Text recognition runs in your browser on your own device, so the document never leaves it. Only the recognition engine and the language model are downloaded from our site, the first time you use OCR.
Will the pages look different after OCR?
No. The scan stays exactly as it was. The recognized text is added as an invisible layer on top of it, word by word in the same place as the printed words, so selecting and highlighting line up with what you see.
Can I edit the text of a scanned PDF?
Yes. After OCR, choose Edit text and click a line. The line is covered with the paper color and retyped in a matching font, size and color, so you can fix a name, a date or an amount.
Which languages are supported?
English and Spanish, and documents that mix both. The language model is about 2 to 3 MB and is kept in your browser after the first download, so later OCR starts right away.
How accurate is it, and what about handwriting?
Clear printed text is usually recognized almost word for word. Accuracy drops for blurry photos, very small print, faint copies and unusual fonts, and handwriting is generally not recognized. If some words were hard to read, the message after OCR tells you, so check names and numbers before relying on them.
How long does it take?
Usually a few seconds per page on a computer and longer on a phone. A progress bar shows which page is being read, and you can stop at any time without changing the document.
What happens to pages that already have text?
They are left out automatically, because they don’t need OCR. You can still add them yourself, for example for a page that is part typed and part scanned, but search may then find some words twice.
Ready to try it?Drop your PDF into the editor and download the result in seconds.
