9 tools
PDF OCR
Read scanned pages without sending them to a server.
OCR turns a picture of words into actual characters. It is the one genuinely heavy operation on this site: a recognition engine compiled to WebAssembly plus a trained language model, several megabytes in total, downloaded on demand and then cached. That cost buys something unusual — scanned documents, which are often the most sensitive files people have, can be read without ever being uploaded anywhere.
Start here
Most used in PDF OCR
Every other tool in this group
Make PDF Searchable
Keep the scan exactly as it looks; make Ctrl+F start working.
Create Searchable PDF
Build an archive your search tools can actually see inside.
OCR Image to Text
Point the recogniser at a picture and get the words it contains.
Image to Text Converter
The alternative to retyping what you can already see on screen.
Scan to Text
For paper that has been scanned and now needs to be text.
OCR JPG
JPEG-specific OCR, including what compression does to accuracy.
OCR PNG
The format that gives OCR the least to complain about.
PDF to Searchable Text
When you want the words out of a scan, not a prettier scan.
Written guides
How to do this work well
- 7 min read
How to OCR a PDF: Accurate Recognition From Any Scan
About the recognition itself: what the engine is doing to your pixels, what raises the error rate, and which problems are fixable before you run it.
- 5 min read
How to Make a Scanned PDF Searchable With Ctrl+F Again
About the artefact rather than the recognition: what a text layer is, why the page looks identical afterwards, and how to verify the result is really searchable.
About PDF OCR
Which languages are supported?
English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Arabic, using the corresponding trained Tesseract models. Each is downloaded only when you select it.
Why is OCR slower than the other tools?
Recognition is computationally expensive and runs on your own CPU rather than a server farm. Expect a few seconds per page, and a one-time model download the first time you use a language.