How to make a scanned PDF searchable
- Add a scanned PDF.
- Select Make searchable and wait while each page is recognised.
- Download the searchable PDF.
About this tool
Scanned documents are pictures of pages: you can read them, but you can't search, select or copy the words. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text in each page image and adds it as an invisible layer exactly over the words, so the page looks the same but becomes searchable.
PDFPUMA runs the open-source Tesseract engine in your browser, so your scans aren't uploaded. Choose the document's language: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese or Dutch. Accuracy depends on scan quality: clean, straight scans at 300 DPI work best; handwriting, low-resolution photos and decorative fonts are recognised poorly, and PDFPUMA tells you how many words it was unsure about.
Pages that already contain text are left as they are. OCR is processor-intensive, so large documents take a while — PDFPUMA shows progress page by page and you can cancel at any time.
Frequently asked questions
Are my files uploaded to PDFPUMA?
No. This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are read and processed on your device and the result is created there too — they are not sent to PDFPUMA's servers.
Will the pages look different?
No. The original page images are kept; the recognised text is added as an invisible layer on top.
Which languages are supported?
English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch. Languages written in other scripts (such as Chinese, Arabic or Cyrillic) aren't supported yet.
How many pages can I OCR?
Business includes up to 200 pages per document and Agency up to 1000.
Which plan includes OCR?
OCR is included in Business and Agency.
Can I use password-protected PDFs?
Not with this tool yet. PDFPUMA doesn't bypass PDF passwords or permissions. If you own the file, remove the password in the app you used to protect it, then try again.