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OCR scans find and copy every word.

Text recognition reads the words in scanned pages and photos and adds them as an invisible layer right over the picture. The page looks the same, but you can search it, select text and copy it.

Drop scans here

PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF and other images · up to 50 MB per file · up to 20 files

01How it works

How to make a scanned PDF searchable

  1. 01

    Add a scan

    Drop a scanned PDF, or photos of pages.

  2. 02

    Recognise text

    Select Recognise text. Text recognition reads English.

  3. 03

    Download

    Download a searchable PDF that looks just like the scan.

Before you upload

Accepts
PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF and other images
Limits
Up to 50 MB per file and 1,000 pages, up to 20 files at once
Processing
On PocketPDF's own servers, with Tesseract text recognition. Files aren't passed to outside conversion services.
Your files
Only your account can download them, unless you create a share link. If you don't sign in they're deleted after 1 hour; once you do, they stay until you delete them (up to 1 GB).
Price
Free. Use the tool straight away, then sign in with Google to download.

02Questions

Common questions

Does the page change?

No. The text is added invisibly over the picture, so the page looks exactly as before.

Which pages are read?

Pages without any text of their own. Pages that already have text are left as they are.

Which languages can it read?

English. Text in other languages isn't recognised reliably yet.

Step-by-step guides

03More tools

Works well with

PDF to Word

Turn a PDF into an editable Word document (DOCX).

PDF to PowerPoint

Turn PDF pages into PPTX slides you can edit.

PDF to Excel

Pull tables out of a PDF into an XLSX spreadsheet.

PDF to images

Save pages as JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF or TIFF.

PDF to text

Extract the text of a PDF as a plain TXT file.

PDF to RTF

Get a rich text document you can edit in almost any app.

See all 42 tools