OCR a PDF — Free & Private
Turn a scanned document into a searchable, selectable PDF. The page still looks exactly the same — you can now search, select and copy its text.
Drag & drop a scanned PDF here
or select a file from your device — make it searchable and selectable
Your PDF is processed locally in your browser and never uploaded. The first OCR run downloads a small English-language data file.How It Works
Make a scan searchable in three simple steps.
Upload your scanned PDF
Drag and drop a PDF file into the box above, or click to browse your device.
OCR runs automatically
Each page is analyzed and its text is recognized, right in your browser — this can take a little while for longer documents.
Download the searchable PDF
Your file looks identical, but its text is now selectable, searchable and copyable.
Why Use PDFHome?
Turn flat scans into real, searchable documents.
Your document stays private
Text recognition runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly — your PDF itself is never uploaded anywhere. (The first run downloads a small English-language data file from a CDN.)
Preserves the original look
The visible page is untouched — OCR only adds an invisible, searchable text layer on top.
Search and select text
Once processed, you can search within the PDF, select and copy text, and use screen readers on it.
Works on any device
PDFHome runs in any modern browser on desktop, tablet or mobile.
Free, no account required
OCR PDF is completely free with no sign-up.
Frequently Asked Questions
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) analyzes an image of text and recognizes the actual letters and words in it, so software can treat what was just a picture as real, searchable text.
No — the visible page image is left exactly as it was. OCR adds an invisible text layer on top so the content becomes selectable and searchable without any visual change.
Accuracy depends heavily on scan quality — clean, well-lit, high-resolution scans of printed text recognize very well, while handwriting, skewed pages or low-resolution images will have more errors.
Text recognition is computationally intensive and runs entirely on your device — longer documents and higher page counts take proportionally longer, since there's no server doing the work in parallel.
Yes. The entire process — rendering pages and recognizing text — happens on your own device in your browser.
The current tool recognizes English text. Support for additional languages is planned for a future update.