MotionShine01 / Read
Each page at 300 dpi
Every page is drawn sharp and read by Tesseract, an open source OCR engine, in the language you pick.
Free tool
OCR PDF, make scans searchable.
A scanned PDF is just pictures of pages: you cannot search it or copy a line from it. Drop it here and every page is read with OCR, in English or one of 15 other languages, and a hidden layer of text is laid over each page exactly where the words are. The PDF looks the same as before, but now Find works, you can select and copy, and screen readers can read it. Pages that already have text are left alone.
Pages are read in your browser. The PDF and its text are never uploaded.
How it works
Read, then layer the words.
02 / Layer
Invisible words on top
The words go on the page as hidden text, each where it sits in the scan, so search highlights the right spot.
03 / Untouched
The scan stays the same
Nothing about how the page looks changes. Pages that already had text are skipped unless you ask.
Questions
Good to know.
What does OCR PDF do?
It reads the words in the pictures of a scanned PDF and adds them as hidden text, so you can search, select and copy, and screen readers can read the document.
Will the PDF look different?
No. The scan stays exactly as it was; the text sits invisibly on top.
Which languages can it read?
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Indonesian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
How long does it take?
A few seconds a page on a recent computer, more for dense pages. The first run also downloads the text reader and the language.
How accurate is it?
Very good on clean, straight scans of printed text; weaker on handwriting, faint copies and photos taken at an angle. Choose the right language for the best result.