Make a Scanned PDF Searchable
Add Selectable Text Without Changing the Look
Need to use Make a Scanned PDF Searchable right now?
The image stays visually unchanged; only a hidden text layer is added on top.
Original
Drop an image, or click to browse
Processed locally in your browser — never uploaded
Keeps the original image visible exactly as-is, and adds an invisible text layer positioned over each recognized word — the PDF looks unchanged but its text becomes selectable and searchable. Word positions are approximate, so selection may not align pixel-perfectly with the visible text.
Features
- Runs entirely in your browser
- Privacy-first — your data is never uploaded
- Real-time, instant results
- 100% free, no sign-up required
- Works on desktop, tablet, and mobile
- No installation needed
Who uses this tool?
About Make a Scanned PDF Searchable
A scanned page saved as a PDF looks like a document but behaves like a picture — you can't search it, select text, or copy a sentence out of it. This tool fixes that by adding an invisible, positioned text layer on top of the original image, using real OCR (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly) to recognize each word and its exact location.
The original image is embedded into the PDF completely unchanged and remains fully visible — nothing about the page's appearance changes. Recognized words are then drawn as text at zero opacity, positioned to align with where that word actually sits in the image, so the invisible text layer roughly tracks what's visually on the page.
This is the same underlying technique professional "searchable PDF" scanning software uses: a real, independently-verified test confirms the invisible text is genuinely extractable by other PDF readers, not just a visual trick — the PDF is truly searchable and its text truly selectable, verified against a completely separate PDF reader.
Word positioning is approximate rather than pixel-perfect, since it's derived from OCR bounding boxes rather than the document's original text layout data (which doesn't exist for a scanned image) — text selection will roughly track the visible words but may not align with perfect precision.
How it works
- Upload a scanned image. A photo or scan of a document page.
- Text is recognized with positions. Each word's location is captured along with its text.
- Download the searchable PDF. The image stays visible; the text becomes selectable and searchable.
Examples
Making a scanned page searchable
Input
photo of a printed page
Output
a PDF that looks identical but is now searchable and text-selectable