OCR PDF
Add a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs. English and Hindi supported. Runs entirely in your browser.
🔒 Processed locally in your browser. Language pack (~10 MB) is fetched once from CDN.
Drop a scanned PDF here or click to select
PDF preview (page 1)
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OCR is CPU-intensive. 10-page scans can take 1-3 minutes on a laptop. Keep this tab open. Results are best on clean, straight, high-resolution scans.
Extracted text (first 500 chars)
How to OCR a PDF
- Drop your scanned PDF into the box above.
- Choose language (English, Hindi, or both).
- Choose a render DPI — higher is more accurate but slower.
- Click Make searchable PDF (or Download text for plain text).
- Wait while the OCR runs. First run also downloads the language pack (~10 MB).
- Save the searchable PDF or text file when done.
Technical limitations — read this
- Handwriting will not be recognised well. Tesseract is trained on printed text. Cursive and stylised handwriting produce garbage.
- Low-resolution scans give poor results. Under 150 DPI, characters blur and OCR errors increase sharply. If possible, rescan at 300 DPI before running OCR.
- Complex layouts confuse OCR. Multi-column documents, tables, and heavily styled text are read in the wrong order.
- Searchable PDF text is invisible. We render the original page as an image and place an invisible text layer over it. Visually identical to the input; only search/copy is added.
- Hindi + English together is slower and less accurate than either language alone — Tesseract has to guess between scripts.
- Not for legal/compliance digitisation. Always review OCR output manually before relying on it.
Frequently asked
How accurate is it?
Good for clean printed text at 300 DPI (~95%+ character accuracy). Poor for handwriting or low-res scans.
Is my file uploaded?
No. OCR runs entirely in-browser via WebAssembly. Only the language model (~10 MB) downloads from a CDN.
Can I search the output?
Yes — the PDF will contain an invisible text layer that standard PDF readers can search. Visually it looks identical to the input.
How long does it take?
Roughly 5-20 seconds per page on a modern laptop at 200 DPI. Older devices and higher DPI take longer.