Scanned PDFs are just images — they look like text but the words are not selectable or searchable. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts those image-based pages into real, editable text. Here is how to OCR any PDF for free in your browser.
Go to pdfeditor.onl/ocr-pdf. No installation or account is required. The tool loads the Tesseract OCR engine directly in your browser.
Upload your scanned PDF. The tool renders each page as an image and runs OCR recognition on the content.
Click Scan Page or Scan All to extract text from each page. Recognized text blocks appear as editable overlays — you can click any block to correct OCR errors, adjust font size, or reposition the text.
Tip: For best OCR accuracy, use PDFs scanned at 150 DPI or higher. Low-resolution or blurry scans will produce lower-quality OCR output.
Click Save PDF to export your document with the recognized text permanently embedded. The output PDF has selectable, searchable text on every scanned page.
The OCR engine supports 30+ languages including English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai, and Hindi.
Yes. Recognized text blocks are fully editable before you save. Click any text block to correct errors, change font size, or reposition it on the page.
No. The entire OCR process runs locally in your browser using WebAssembly. Your files are never sent to any server.
Yes — 100% free at pdfeditor.onl/ocr-pdf with no account, no limits, and no upload.