Make a Scanned PDF Searchable
Short answer
Add an invisible text layer to a scanned PDF so Ctrl+F works and text can be copied. The page still looks identical. Runs in your browser, nothing uploaded.
Drop a scanned PDF here
or drop your file here.
Nothing is uploaded — it stays on your device.
Runs in your browser — your file is never uploaded.
Add a scanned PDF, then press “Make PDF searchable”.
A scanned PDF is a picture of a page. Your eyes read it fine, but the file contains no text at all — so searching finds nothing, you cannot copy a sentence out of it, and it is invisible to every search index and document management system you might feed it to.
Making it searchable does not change how the page looks. The original image stays exactly as it was, and a text layer is positioned invisibly over it, word by word, at the coordinates each word actually occupies. Open the result and it appears unchanged — but now Ctrl+F highlights the right word in the right place, and selecting text works normally.
That positioning is the part that has to be right. The recognition engine measures word boxes from the top-left of the page image, while PDF measures from the bottom-left, so the coordinates have to be flipped. Get that wrong and you produce a file that looks perfect and whose hidden text sits upside down — searchable in theory, useless in practice.
How to make a scanned PDF searchable
- 1Add the scanned PDF. Drop it in — it stays on your device.
- 2Start recognition. Press 'Make PDF searchable' and wait a few seconds per page.
- 3Download. You get a searchable PDF plus a plain .txt copy.
Frequently asked questions
Does the page still look the same?+
Yes. The original page image is kept and the recognised text is drawn over it at zero opacity, so nothing visible changes — the text is selectable but never seen.
Will the file get bigger?+
Usually, because the output embeds a rendered image of each page. If size matters more than searchability, take the plain .txt output or compress the result afterwards.