OCR a PDF
Upload a scan, pick its language, and download a PDF that looks the same but lets you search, select and copy the text.
Drop a file hereLet go to start
or paste with Ctrl/⌘+V
Free, no account needed — download as soon as it's done. See plans
What it does
OCR PDF, explained
OCR PDF recognizes the text in scanned pages and adds it as an invisible layer behind the image. The page looks exactly as before, but Ctrl+F finds words, you can copy a paragraph into an email, and screen readers and AI tools have text to work with.
Read more
Use it on anything that came off a scanner, a phone camera or a fax: signed contracts, receipts for expense reports, old records you need to search. If you click on a page and can't select a single word, it needs OCR.
OCR gives you searchable text, not a reconstructed document. Headings, columns and tables stay as pixels on the page; only the hidden layer is new. To change the words on the page, use Edit scanned PDF. To get an editable Word file, run OCR and then PDF to Word.
Recognition runs in PDFBetter's processing container with the Tesseract engine. It handles clean printed text well. For handwriting, dense tables and poor scans, AI OCR adds a vision-model correction pass; for crooked or faint pages, Restore scanned PDF cleans the image first.
How to do it
OCR a PDF in 4 steps
1A scan: only pixels
2Recognize the text
3Text you can search and select
- 1
Upload a scan
Upload a PDF or a JPG, PNG or TIFF image. Images are placed on PDF pages first.
- 2
Choose the language
Select every language printed on the pages. Accents and non-Latin scripts depend on this setting.
- 3
Run OCR
Each page counts toward your OCR allowance: 5 pages without an account, 20 on Free and 1,000 on Pro each month.
- 4
Check and download
Search for a word you can see on the page to confirm recognition, then download the searchable PDF.
Example
Before and after
A 30-page bundle of scanned supplier invoices where searching for an invoice number returns nothing.
The same 30 pages, visually identical, where searching for the invoice number jumps to the right page and the total can be copied as text.
Settings & formats
What you can control
- Languages
- One or more recognition languages. Mixed-language documents should have all of them selected.
Input
Output
Good to know before you start
- Handwriting, stylized fonts, stamps over text and very low-resolution scans are recognized poorly or not at all.
- Reading order can be wrong on multi-column layouts and forms, which shows up when you copy long passages.
- Tables are recognized as lines of text; cell structure is not rebuilt.
- Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked first.
If something goes wrong
If something goes wrong
- Search finds some words but not others
- The missing words were misread. Check the language setting, clean the scan with Restore scanned PDF and run OCR again, or use AI OCR for a correction pass.
- Copied text comes out jumbled
- OCR read the columns in the wrong order. Copy one column at a time, or convert with PDF to Word and fix the order there.
- OCR ran out of pages
- Your monthly OCR page allowance is used up. Run only the pages you need, or upgrade; Pro includes 1,000 OCR pages a month.
OCR PDF: questions people ask
Does OCR change how my document looks?
No. It adds an invisible text layer and leaves the scanned image untouched, so the printed copy is identical.
What's the difference between OCR and AI OCR?
OCR uses the Tesseract engine and is counted in OCR pages. AI OCR runs the same step, then sends page images and text to a vision model that fixes misreads in handwriting, tables and poor scans; it also costs AI credits.
Can I edit the text after OCR?
You can select, copy and search it. To change words on the page, open the result in Edit scanned PDF, or convert it with PDF to Word.
Do I need OCR before using AI tools on a scan?
Yes. Summaries, chat and AI search read the document's text, and a scan without OCR has none.
Will OCR read a page that is upside down?
Rotate the page first with Rotate PDF. Recognition works best on upright, straight pages.
Can I OCR a photo of a document?
Yes, upload the JPG or PNG directly. Shoot it flat, in even light, with the page filling the frame for the best result.