OCR PDF

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) extracts text from scanned documents and image-based PDFs where the text isn't natively selectable or searchable. This is essential for making paper documents digitally useful — once OCR'd, you can search for keywords, copy text, and use the content in other applications. PDFly's OCR tool analyzes each page image, recognizes printed characters in multiple languages, and produces a PDF with a searchable text layer — all processed in your browser.

Upload your scanned PDF and the tool processes each page, recognizing printed text and adding a hidden text layer behind the images. The output is a PDF where you can search for keywords using Ctrl+F, select and copy text to your clipboard, and use the content in other applications. The original page images are preserved alongside the extracted text layer, so the document looks identical visually but is now fully searchable.

OCR accuracy depends heavily on scan quality — clear, well-lit scans with standard printed fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri) produce the best results. Handwritten text, very low-resolution scans (below 150 DPI), unusual decorative fonts, or heavily degraded documents with stains or creases may have lower accuracy. For digital PDFs that already have selectable text, the Extract Text tool is faster and more accurate since it reads the native text directly without performing character recognition.