Will the PDF look different afterward?

It should look the same, but the file is rebuilt: each page is re-rendered and re-encoded as a high-quality JPEG with the text layer added. The output isn't byte-identical, and links, form fields, and bookmarks aren't carried over — rarely an issue for pure scans, which have none.

Why can't I see the added text?

It's written in invisible rendering mode, deliberately. You see the original image; the text layer exists purely so search, selection, and indexing have something to find. Selecting text highlights the printed words above it.

How accurate is the search?

Exactly as accurate as the OCR. Correctly recognized words are findable; misread words are not. Clean 300 DPI scans of printed text give the best results — blurry or skewed pages leave gaps in the text layer.

How long does a large PDF take?

Budget a few seconds per page on typical hardware; a 100-page scan can take several minutes. Keep the tab open and in the foreground until the download starts.

My PDF already has selectable text — should I run it through this?

No. A digitally created PDF is already searchable, and this tool would replace its crisp vector text with rendered images. If Ctrl+F already finds words, you don't need OCR — use PDF to Text if you just want the text out.

Does my scan get uploaded?

No. Rendering, recognition, and PDF assembly all happen in your browser; the document never leaves your machine.

Searchable PDF

Make scanned PDFs searchable by adding an invisible OCR text layer.

Drop PDF files here or browse

Max 100MB per file

Language

This may take a while for large PDFs. Each page is OCR'd individually.

About Make PDF Searchable (OCR)

A scanned PDF is really a stack of photographs. It opens and prints fine, but Ctrl+F finds nothing, you can't select a sentence, and document-management systems can't index it. Making it 'searchable' means running OCR on every page and embedding the recognized words as an invisible text layer positioned directly over the printed words in the image.

Convertora does this entirely in your browser. Each page is rendered at high resolution, Tesseract.js recognizes the text along with the bounding box of every word, and the page is rebuilt with the image on top and an invisible, correctly positioned text layer underneath. The result looks like the original scan — but searching, selecting, and copying now work, and so does indexing by Windows Search, Spotlight, and document archives.

Because rendering and OCR both happen locally, confidential scans — signed contracts, medical files, HR records — are never uploaded. The only download is the one-time language model, cached after the first run.

How to use it

1Upload a scanned PDF up to 100 MB. This tool takes PDFs only; for a single photographed page, the OCR tool gives you the raw text instead.
2Pick the document's language (English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, or Dutch).
3Click Make Searchable. Each page is rendered to an image, recognized word by word, and reassembled with an invisible text layer sized and placed to match each printed word.
4The progress bar advances page by page — every page is a full OCR pass, so large documents take a while.
5The result downloads automatically as yourfile-searchable.pdf. Open it and press Ctrl+F to confirm search works.

Common use cases

Making an archive of scanned contracts searchable so you can find a clause by keyword instead of reading page by page.
Preparing scanned records for a document-management system that indexes text content.
Adding a text layer to scanned reports so screen readers can read them aloud.
Copying citations out of a scanned book chapter or journal article instead of retyping them.
Turning years of paper invoices or correspondence into a digital archive you can actually query.

Frequently asked questions

Tips

Test a short excerpt first (split a few pages out with the Split PDF tool) before committing to a 200-page job.
Crooked scans hurt word detection — rescan straightened pages if you can.
Spot-check the output by searching for a few words you can see on different pages.
If the output file ends up larger than you'd like, run it through the Compress PDF tool.

100% private — runs in your browser

Convertora processes everything on your device using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Files never leave your browser, are never uploaded to a server, and are never seen by us or anyone else. The moment you close the tab, the data is gone — there is no temporary cloud copy, no log entry, no retained backup.

Because the work happens locally, processing speed depends on your device — but there are no rate limits, no daily caps, and no file size restrictions beyond what your browser can handle in memory. No signup, no account, no payment. The tool works the same in incognito mode, on a corporate network, or after the page has loaded once, even with the network disconnected.