OCR PDF — Make Scanned PDFs Searchable
Extract text from scanned PDFs with Tesseract OCR — download a searchable, copy-able PDF.
Files are processed securely and deleted within 1 hour. Free for up to 10 pages. We never store or share your files.
How to make a scanned PDF searchable
- Upload your scanned PDF by clicking or dragging it into the upload area.
- Tesseract 5 processes each page — rendering the image, detecting text regions, and extracting character sequences.
- An invisible text layer is added behind the original page images, making the document searchable and copy-able.
- Download the OCR'd PDF — up to 10 pages are processed for free. OCR can take 30–60 seconds.
Why use Formfy's OCR PDF tool?
Scanned PDFs are just images — they look like documents but contain no actual text. You can't search them with Ctrl+F, copy text from them, or have them indexed by search engines or document management systems. OCR solves this by adding a real text layer that matches the printed characters on each page.
Formfy's OCR tool uses Tesseract 5 — the open-source OCR engine trusted by Google, dozens of governments, and hundreds of archival projects worldwide. After processing, your PDF looks identical to the original but is now fully searchable, selectable, and indexable. Files are permanently deleted from our servers within 1 hour.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is OCR?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads text from images or scanned documents and converts it into selectable, searchable text.
How many pages can OCR process?
The free tool processes up to 10 pages. For longer documents, consider splitting the PDF first.
How accurate is the OCR?
Tesseract 5 provides excellent accuracy on clean, printed text. Handwritten text, unusual fonts, and low-resolution scans may have reduced accuracy.
What languages are supported?
Currently English. Multi-language support is coming soon.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
Yes, OCR requires server-side processing with Tesseract. Files are deleted within 1 hour.