OCR PDF – Searchable PDF

Make scans searchable and copyable

A scanned PDF is a stack of pictures: you cannot search it, copy a sentence from it or have a screen reader read it aloud. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in those pictures and adds an invisible text layer exactly over them. The page looks the same, but now Ctrl+F finds words, text can be selected and copied, and the document can be indexed by your computer or a document management system.

Fileopia runs OCR with the Tesseract engine inside your browser. The language models are downloaded once and cached; your scans are never uploaded. That makes it suitable for medical records, legal files, invoices and ID documents.

Features

• 12 languages, combinable two at a time – see the table below.
• Searchable PDF output – original pages kept, invisible text added.
• TXT export – get the recognised text as a plain-text file, or both PDF and TXT together.
• Page range – OCR only the pages you need.
• Skip pages that already have text – mixed documents are processed faster, and existing digital text is not duplicated.
• Adjustable resolution – 200 DPI is a good default; raise it to 300 for small print.

Supported OCR languages

Choose a second language for bilingual documents, such as English + Hindi or French + Arabic.

How to OCR a PDF

• Drop your scanned PDF.
• Choose the document's language (and optionally a second one).
• Pick the output: searchable PDF, TXT, or both.
• Optionally enter a page range and keep 'Skip pages that already contain text' ticked.
• Click Start and wait – each page takes a few seconds depending on your device.
• Download and test it: press Ctrl+F in your PDF reader and search for a word.

Getting the best accuracy

• Scan at 300 DPI in greyscale or colour; 200 DPI is fine for normal-size print.
• Straight pages recognise better – fix crooked scans with Deskew PDF and sideways pages with Rotate PDF.
• Choose the correct language; accents and non-Latin letters depend on it.
• Very light, faded or handwritten text is hard for any OCR – handwriting is generally not supported.
• For phone photos, PDF Scanner crops and enhances pages before OCR.

What can I do with an OCR'd PDF?

• Search large archives of scanned letters and contracts.
• Copy quotes and figures into reports.
• Convert to editable formats with PDF to Word or tables with PDF to Excel.
• Make documents accessible to screen-reader users.
• Edit text with Edit PDF.

Searchable PDF vs text file

A searchable PDF keeps the exact look of the original scan with selectable text underneath – ideal for archives and sharing. A TXT file contains only the words, without layout – ideal for pasting into other programs, translation or analysis. Choose 'both' if you need each.

Privacy of OCR in the browser

Many online OCR services send your scans to a server for processing. Here, the OCR engine and language data run on your own computer or phone. Once the page and language model have loaded, you can even disconnect from the internet and keep processing.

Speed and large documents

OCR is computationally heavy. A modern laptop typically handles a page in a few seconds; phones take longer. For a 200-page scan, use the page range to process it in chunks, or leave the tab open while it works – progress is shown per page.

OCR for right-to-left and Indian scripts

Arabic is recognised right-to-left and the text layer keeps the correct reading order, so search and copy work in Arabic-language readers. Hindi (Devanagari) and Tamil are supported with their own trained models, including conjunct characters and vowel signs. For mixed documents – an English form with Hindi names, for example – choose both languages so each word is matched against the right alphabet.