OCR a PDF
Recognise the text in a scanned PDF and add an invisible text layer, so it becomes searchable and copyable — in 30 languages, privately.
OCR runs in your browser with the open-source Tesseract engine. The language file (2–15 MB) is downloaded once from a content network and cached; your document is never uploaded. Clean, straight scans at 200–300 dpi give the best results.
Drop your PDF files here or click to browse
Stays on your device — nothing is uploaded
Select several files to process them together
How do I OCR a PDF for free?
Open PDFkitt's OCR PDF tool (pdfkitt.com/ocr-pdf/): choose the scanned PDF, pick the language, run OCR, then download. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and it runs entirely in your browser — the file is never uploaded to a server.
- Price
- Free — no trial, no paid tier, no watermark
- Account
- Not needed
- File upload
- None — processed on your device, in the browser
- Input
- PDF files (several at once)
- Limits
- No daily quota and no file-count limit
- Works on
- Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android, in any modern browser
Updated · by the PDFkitt team
A scanned PDF is a stack of photographs: you cannot search it, copy from it or have a screen reader read it. OCR (optical character recognition) fixes that by recognising the printed words and writing them into the PDF as an invisible layer exactly over the image. The page looks the same; Ctrl+F, copy-paste and indexing now work.
PDFkitt runs the open-source Tesseract engine inside your browser, so scans of contracts, medical records and ID documents are processed without being uploaded. Choose the language, the pages and whether you want a searchable PDF, a text file or both.
How to OCR a PDF
- Choose the scanned PDF Drop it on the upload card.
- Pick the language The language file downloads once and is cached.
- Run OCR Each page is rendered and recognised on your device; larger files take a few minutes.
- Download A searchable PDF and/or the text.
Why use PDFkitt to OCR PDF?
The file is processed inside your browser tab. Disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it still works.
No signup, no email, no daily quota, no page limit, no watermark. Use it as often as you like.
Phone, tablet or desktop, in Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox. Nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
Is my scan uploaded for OCR?
No. The recognition engine runs inside your browser tab. Only the language data file is downloaded, and it is cached for next time.
How accurate is it?
Very good on clean printed text (typically 95–99%); lower on faxes, skewed photos and small fonts. Rotate and crop first if needed.
Does it change how the PDF looks?
No. The recognised text is invisible and sits over the original image.