How to Convert Scanned PDF to Editable Text (OCR Guide)

What is OCR and why do you need it?

When you scan a physical document, your scanner creates an image — a photograph of text. The PDF it creates looks like text but is technically just pixels. You can't select words, use Ctrl+F to search, or copy content. OCR technology reads those pixels and converts them into actual text that computers can understand and process.

After OCR processing, your PDF becomes a "searchable PDF" — it looks identical but now has an invisible layer of text underneath the image, making it searchable and copyable.

How to OCR a PDF for free

Go to Everyday Tools' free OCR tool and upload your scanned PDF. Select the language of your document (English, Malay, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and more are supported). The tool processes your document using Tesseract OCR and returns a searchable PDF in minutes.

What languages are supported?

The OCR tool supports: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Arabic, Malay, and more. Select your document's language before processing for the best accuracy.

Tips for better OCR results

• Scan at 300 DPI minimum — lower resolution scans produce more OCR errors. If you're rescanning a document, use 300–600 DPI.
• Straight pages — pages that are slightly tilted reduce accuracy. Most modern scanners auto-correct this, but photographed documents may need manual straightening.
• Clear text — faded, handwritten, or stylized text reduces accuracy. Tesseract works best with standard printed fonts.
• Good contrast — black text on white paper gives the best results.

After OCR: extract the text

Once your PDF is OCR'd and searchable, you can also extract all text content using our PDF to Text converter. This gives you a plain text file of all content — useful for copying into Word, editing, or processing further.

Common OCR use cases

• Making old scanned contracts searchable and archivable
• Extracting text from scanned invoices for accounting software
• Converting printed academic papers into editable format
• Making government form PDFs searchable
• Digitising physical books or notes

Frequently asked questions

Can OCR read handwritten text?

Standard OCR (including Tesseract) has limited accuracy with handwritten text. It works best with clearly printed, typed text. For handwriting recognition, you'd need a specialised deep learning model.

How accurate is free OCR?

For high-quality scans of standard printed text, Tesseract achieves 95–99% accuracy. For lower-quality scans, faded text, or unusual fonts, accuracy may drop to 85–95%.

Does OCR work on PDFs with mixed text and images?

Yes. OCR processes the entire page, adding a text layer beneath the visible content. Image elements remain as images; text elements become searchable.