Home›Tools›OCR PDF
✓ 100% Free🔒 Files Stay On Device✦ No Watermark🤖 AI-Powered

OCR PDF Make Scanned PDFs Searchable

Extract text from scanned PDFs and image-based documents. Download as searchable PDF or plain text. Powered by Tesseract.js — runs in your browser.

📄

Drop your PDF here

or click to browse — max 200 MB

0 / 1 filesMax 200MB per file

How to OCR a PDF Online — Free

Make any scanned PDF searchable in three easy steps — no software, no account, no upload.

1

Upload your scanned PDF by clicking Drop your PDF here or dragging it into the upload area.

2

Choose your document language and the output format — Searchable PDF or plain text file.

3

Click Start OCR and wait while Tesseract.js processes each page. Download your file when complete.

What is OCR and when do you need it?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts images of text into machine-readable text. Scanned PDFs, photographed documents, and image-based PDFs contain no selectable text — they are essentially pictures of pages. OCR analyses the visual patterns in these images and reconstructs the underlying text layer, making documents searchable, copyable, and accessible to screen readers and AI tools.

Tips for best OCR accuracy

Scan at a minimum of 300 DPI — this is the industry standard for reliable text recognition. Use good, even lighting when photographing documents; shadows and uneven exposure significantly reduce accuracy. Select the correct language for your document — OCR engines use language-specific dictionaries to improve recognition. Avoid highly compressed JPEGs, which introduce artefacts around text edges.

OCR PDF in Indian languages

Doclair's OCR tool fully supports all major Indian languages. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, and Urdu are all available from the language selector. Simply choose your language before starting OCR for best results with Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, and other Indian scripts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Accuracy depends on scan quality. For clean, high-resolution scans of printed text, Tesseract typically achieves 95%+ accuracy. Handwriting, low-resolution scans, or unusual fonts reduce accuracy.
Never. Tesseract.js runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. Your PDF never leaves your device.
Doclair supports 27+ languages including all major Indian languages: Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi and Urdu — plus English, Chinese, Arabic, French, German, Japanese and more.
No. In searchable PDF mode, the original page images are preserved exactly. The recognised text is added as an invisible layer underneath — invisible to the eye but selectable and searchable.
300 DPI is the sweet spot for OCR. Doclair renders pages at 2× scale (approximately 144 DPI equivalent) which balances speed and accuracy. For very small text, try scanning at 400+ DPI before converting to PDF.
Tesseract has limited handwriting support. Printed text is recognised well. For handwriting, accuracy varies significantly — clear, neat handwriting works better than cursive.