How to make a scanned PDF searchable with OCR
Add an invisible text layer over each page image so the file becomes searchable and selectable without changing how it looks.
Open OCR PDF and choose the scanned file you want to process.
Pick English, Arabic, or both to match the document language, then let the browser process page by page.
Download the new copy and test search or text selection inside it to verify the result.
Searchable means a text layer
A scanned PDF is a stack of page photos: you can see the words, but the file contains no text to search or copy. OCR solves this by drawing an invisible text layer over each rendered page image — the document looks identical, except search, selection, and copy now work. That distinction matters: OCR changes what software can read, not what the page looks like.
Why language choice matters
OCR recognizes shapes against a specific language model. An English pass over an Arabic document produces noise, and vice versa; a bilingual document needs the combined pass. The browser-side engine offers English, Arabic, or both — pick based on the actual document content, and expect mixed-language pages to take roughly twice as long as a single-language run.
Respect the page cap
The tool currently processes up to 50 pages per run. That bound is deliberate: every page is rendered to an image, recognized, then reassembled, and memory in a browser tab is finite. For a longer scan, split the document with Split PDF, OCR the parts, and merge them back — each part stays well inside the limit.
Verify before trusting the copy
OCR accuracy depends on scan quality: clean 200–300 dpi scans recognize very well, while phone photos of pages with shadows and skew produce errors. After processing, open the result, search for a few distinctive words, and select a paragraph to confirm the text layer landed. Keep the original scan — the OCR layer can always be regenerated, never recovered from a wrong result.
When OCR will not help
Handwriting, decorative fonts, tables, and form layouts are weak spots for any recognition engine. Expect plain printed paragraphs to work best. If you need the actual text for editing rather than a searchable archive, export recognized text via PDF to Text after OCR, or use the AI extract path for key fields.
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