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Make a scanned PDF searchable with OCR

Add an invisible text layer to scanned PDFs and photos so you can search, select and copy the words, or save the text as a .txt file. Recognition runs in your browser in 20 languages; it's free, has no watermark and your file never leaves your device.

No watermarkFree, no sign-upRuns in your browserAccepts .pdf, JPG, PNG, WebP
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Quick answer

How do I make a scanned PDF searchable for free?

Add the scanned PDF to Mergevanta's OCR PDF tool, choose the document's language and press Make searchable. Text is recognized in your browser and laid invisibly over each page, so the PDF looks the same but can be searched, selected and copied. It's free, adds no watermark and the file is never uploaded.

Price
Free
Watermark
None
Sign-up
Not required
Accepts
.pdf, JPG, PNG, WebP
You get
A searchable .pdf, a .txt file, or both
Processing
In your browser (Tesseract OCR) — only the engine and language data are downloaded, never your file
Files stored
Never
Works on
Windows, macOS, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android

Updated

What you get

Why use Mergevanta to make a scanned PDF searchable

Pages look exactly the same

The original page images stay untouched. The recognized words sit on top as invisible text, placed where they appear on the page.

20 languages

Including English, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Russian — choose up to three at once for mixed documents.

Text you can reuse

Download a .txt of every page, or copy the recognized text straight from the preview.

Never uploaded

Recognition runs in your browser. Only the OCR engine and language data are downloaded the first time, then your browser keeps them.

Step by step

How to make a scanned PDF searchable with Mergevanta

  1. 1

    Press Choose file and add a scanned PDF, or one or more JPG, PNG or WebP images.

  2. 2

    Pick the language of the text — up to three for documents that mix languages.

  3. 3

    Choose what you get: Searchable PDF, Text file (.txt) or Both.

  4. 4

    Leave Skip pages that already have text on, so typed pages stay as they are.

  5. 5

    Press Make searchable (or Extract text) and download the result.

FAQ

OCR PDF questions

No. OCR runs in your browser. The first run downloads the OCR engine (about 1.4 MB) and the data for each language you pick (about 1–3 MB each) from a public CDN, and your browser keeps them for next time. Your document never leaves your device.

Clean, straight scans of printed text at around 300 dpi are usually read very accurately. Blurry photos, handwriting, tiny print and decorative fonts lower accuracy. The result shows an average confidence score, so you know when to double-check names and numbers.

No. Every page keeps its original image; the text is added as an invisible layer, so the PDF prints and displays the same while search, selection and copy work.

English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Bengali, Tamil, Urdu, Turkish, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Dutch and Polish. Choose up to three at once.

They are skipped by default, so typed pages aren't read twice. Turn off Skip pages that already have text to run OCR on them anyway.

Yes. Enter the password when asked; it is only used in your browser tab. The searchable PDF you download has no password.

Photograph the pages with Scan to PDF, which straightens and cleans them into one PDF, then bring that file here to make it searchable.

Keep going

Other tools in the studio

Scan to PDF

Photograph pages with your camera or add photos, straighten each one from its corners, pick a clean black-and-white or enhanced look and save one PDF.

Open

PDF to Word

Drop in a PDF and get back a real .docx that looks like the original — text, fonts, colours, tables and images stay where they were, and every word is editable.

Open

Compress PDF

Make a PDF smaller for email, uploads and sharing.

Open