FREE
OCR PDF
Recognise text in scanned PDFs and images — English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian.
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Convert & Export
Make a Scanned PDF Searchable
Ctrl+F finds nothing in a scanned PDF because the pages are images. This tool recognises the text and adds it as an invisible layer exactly over the words, so search, selection and copy work while the pages look unchanged.
- Runs in your browser — no upload
- Free — no sign-up
How to use Make PDF Searchable
- 1Open the scanned PDF.
- 2Pick the document language(s) and keep “Skip pages with text” to leave digital pages untouched.
- 3Run OCR and download the searchable PDF.
Why use Make PDF Searchable on PDF NOVA
Looks exactly the same
The original page content is kept; only an invisible text layer is added.
Skips digital pages
Pages that already contain real text are detected and left as they are.
Files stay on your device
Processing happens in your browser. Your document is never uploaded to a server, so there is nothing to delete afterwards.
Processing on your device
Make PDF Searchable processes your file in your browser on your device. The file is not uploaded for processing. Download the result to keep a permanent copy. Your active PDF is saved locally in this browser for recovery across refreshes. Close Document removes it; recovery expires after 24 hours and is cleaned up when PDF NOVA next opens. Unsaved changes are not restored.
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Frequently asked questions
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. This tool runs entirely in your web browser using JavaScript and Web Workers. The file is read from your device, processed in memory and saved back to your device.
Will the file get much bigger?
Only slightly: the text layer is a few kilobytes per page. The page images are not re-encoded.