How to make a scanned PDF searchable with OCR
A scanned PDF is just images, so you can't select or search its text. To fix that, open the OCR PDF tool, choose the document's language, and run it — PDFER recognizes the text on your device and adds an invisible, selectable text layer over each page.
Why search doesn't work on scans
When you scan or photograph a page, the result is a picture. There is no text data behind it, so Find (Ctrl/Cmd-F) and copy-paste have nothing to work with.
OCR (optical character recognition) analyzes the image, detects the characters, and writes them back as a hidden text layer aligned to the glyphs — the page looks identical but is now searchable.
Choosing the language
Recognition accuracy depends on picking the right language model. PDFER offers several (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch); select the one your document is written in.
The first run in a given language downloads that model once from the same origin, then works offline.
After OCR
Once the searchable PDF is downloaded you can select and copy its text, and other tools like PDF to Text or PDF to Word will have real text to extract.
Tools mentioned in this guide
Frequently asked
- Is OCR done on my device or in the cloud?
- On your device. PDFER runs Tesseract via WebAssembly in your browser; the scan and the recognized text never leave your machine.
- Which languages are supported?
- English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. Pick the document's language before running OCR for the best accuracy.