OCR PDF – Make Scans Searchable

A scanned PDF is really just a stack of pictures: you can read it, but you can't search it, select a sentence or copy a number out of it. OCR (optical character recognition) finds the text in those images and adds it to the PDF as an invisible layer placed under the words you see. The pages look the same, but Ctrl+F, copy and paste, and screen readers now work.

pdfdots runs OCR with Tesseract, an established open-source engine, directly in your browser. Your document is never uploaded. The only download is the language model for the language you pick (English, Turkish, Spanish, Portuguese, German or French), roughly 10–20 MB, and your browser keeps it so later runs start faster. Choosing the right language matters, because it helps the engine recognize accented letters and common words.

Results depend on the scan. Clean, straight, well-lit pages at a decent resolution give very good results; blurry photos, skewed pages, tiny print or unusual fonts lead to more mistakes, and handwriting is not reliably recognized. Each page is re-rendered at about 200 DPI before recognition, so the finished file can be larger than the original — run it through Compress PDF afterwards if needed.

Recognition takes a few seconds per page on a typical computer, so long documents need some patience, and phones are slower. If you only need part of a long scan, extract those pages first. Once your PDF has a text layer, you can also convert it to Excel or Word much more reliably.