OCR PDF Pro
Recognize scanned PDFs and export searchable files without losing the original page appearance.
Run optical character recognition on a scanned PDF to make it searchable, exporting as a PDF with an invisible text layer, or as Word or Excel with the scanned page appearance preserved and recognized text alongside it. Uses Tesseract OCR running locally in your browser across 10+ languages, so scans never upload to a server. This is the prerequisite step before using PDF Translator or selectable-text PDF to Word on a scanned document, since neither works on image-only pages.
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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 2026-08-03
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?
Yes. Both keep every scanned page visually intact; Excel also includes a separate sheet with recognized text.
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.