OCR PDF Pro
Recognize scanned PDFs and create a searchable PDF or separate text output locally.
Run optical character recognition on a scanned PDF. Searchable PDF keeps each page image and adds an invisible text layer. Word export keeps page images only; Excel keeps page images and adds recognized text on a separate sheet; plain text exports recognition without layout. Tesseract runs locally in your browser, so scans never upload to a server.
Runs on your device. This tool processes your file inside this browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, so it also works offline once the page has loaded, and closing the tab discards the file from memory.
Loading tool
How it works
- 01
Upload your scanned PDF.
- 02
Choose the document language(s) for recognition.
- 03
Select an export format: searchable PDF, Word, or Excel.
- 04
Click Run OCR and download the result.
Details
- Category
- Documents & PDF
- Formats
- Runs
- In your browser
- Files uploaded
- No
- Cost per run
- Free
- Sign-in
- Not required
- Works offline
- Yes, once loaded
Last updated 2026-08-12
Common questions
What makes the PDF searchable?
Each page is rebuilt from its scan with an invisible text layer aligned to the recognized lines.
Do Word and Excel keep the scanned page layout?
Both keep each scanned page as an image. Word text is not selectable; Excel also includes a separate sheet with recognized text. For editable Word text, create a searchable PDF first and run PDF to Word on it.
Are all languages searchable in PDF output?
OCR and text exports support every listed language. The searchable PDF layer uses a built-in Latin font, so Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Cyrillic should use Word, Excel, or text export when exact characters matter.
Why can the first run take longer?
Tesseract downloads the selected language model once and then caches it in the browser.
Use this from your code
This tool is also a REST endpoint, so you can run it in a pipeline instead of by hand. Each call costs 5 credits and needs an API key. See the API reference for every parameter.
curl -X POST https://fileoven.com/api/v1/tools/ocr-pdf \ -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..." \ -F "file=@input.pdf"