About OCR PDF

OCR — Optical Character Recognition — analyzes scanned images and photographs within a PDF and converts the visual text into a searchable, selectable, and copyable text layer. After OCR processing, you can use Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F) to search the document, select and copy text passages, highlight specific sections, and have the document read aloud by screen readers. The original scan appearance is preserved exactly — OCR adds an invisible text layer beneath the page image.

The language selector currently offers 15 languages: English, Arabic, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, and Turkish. Picking the right one matters — Tesseract, the recognition engine behind this tool, uses the selected language's trained data to know which characters and word patterns to expect, so choosing the correct language noticeably improves accuracy over leaving it on the wrong default. For best recognition accuracy, input documents should be scanned at 300 DPI or higher with pages correctly oriented.

Key Features

• 15 selectable languages, including Latin, CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), and Arabic scripts
• Preserves original scan appearance — invisible searchable text layer added underneath
• Powered by Tesseract, an open-source OCR engine, run per-page against your document
• Works on documents of any page count with no limits
• Output is a searchable PDF — text is extractable and accessible to screen readers