Scanned French documents — administrative forms, notarial acts, insurance policies — can be made searchable with free OCR. The engine correctly recognizes French-specific characters: à, â, ç, è, é, ê, î, ô, ù, û, ü, and ligatures.
Go to pdfeditor.onl/ocr-pdf. The OCR engine uses Tesseract.js with a French language model pre-trained on French text.
Drag or click to upload your scanned French document. All pages are rendered as high-resolution images for analysis.
Tip: French OCR works best at 300 DPI. Documents with complex formatting (multiple columns, tables) may need manual correction of a few blocks.
Choose French (Français) from the language dropdown. This activates the French recognition model for accurate diacritic handling.
Each recognized text block appears as an overlay. Check that ç (cedilla), accent marks, and elided words like l'article are recognized correctly.
Click Download PDF. You now have a searchable French PDF you can query by keyword — useful for finding specific clauses in French contracts or administrative letters.
Yes. The language model covers standard French which applies equally to European and Canadian French — the character sets are the same.
Select French as the primary language. Tesseract handles bilingual documents well when one language is dominant.