OCR
OCR PDF Online
Run optical character recognition on scanned PDFs to make the text searchable, selectable, and ready for copy-paste or conversion.
Drag & drop your PDF here
Files are securely processed and automatically deleted.
A scanned PDF is just a picture of text — you can't search it, select it, or copy it, and converting it to Word or Excel produces garbage without an extra step. Optical character recognition (OCR) adds a real, searchable text layer behind the scanned image.
pdfhubb's OCR tool recognizes text in scanned PDFs and rebuilds the document with an invisible, selectable text layer — the page looks exactly the same, but now you can search, copy, and accurately convert it.
Need to go the other way, or handle a related step first? Take a look at our PDF to Word tool.
How to Use OCR PDF
- 1
Upload your file
Drag and drop your scanned PDF, or use "Choose Files" to browse your device. Nothing leaves your session until you start processing.
- 2
Configure options
Adjust the settings for this tool — order, ranges, quality, or text — directly in the panel below the file list.
- 3
Run OCR on your PDF
Click the action button to start. Most files finish in a few seconds; larger documents may take a little longer.
- 4
Download your file
Download your searchable PDF straight to your device, or start again with a new file — the original is deleted from our servers shortly after.
Features
- Automatic language detection for major world languages
- Optional deskew to straighten crooked scans
- Option to re-OCR pages that already contain some text
- Visual appearance of the original scan is unchanged
Benefits
- Make old scanned archives searchable
- Copy and paste text straight out of a scanned document
- Significantly improves accuracy when converting to Word or Excel afterward
- No visible change to the page — only functionality is added
Privacy and Security
Scanned documents you upload for OCR are processed temporarily and deleted from our servers shortly after the job completes. We don't read or retain the recognized text content.