Make your scans searchable and selectable

A regular image PDF is a flat picture wrapped in a .pdf container — you cannot select, copy or search the text in it. A searchable PDF has an invisible OCR text layer aligned behind every visible character, so Ctrl+F finds words, Copy works, and screen readers can read the page aloud while the visual appearance stays identical.

The OCR engine reads every word and stores its text and bounding box behind the original image at the exact pixel coordinates. Visually the page looks identical to the original scan, but Adobe Acrobat, Preview, Chrome and every modern PDF viewer can now select, search and copy the text as if it were native digital text.

Yes. The text layer is standard PDF (no proprietary extension), so Adobe Acrobat (Reader and Pro), macOS Preview, Chrome's built-in PDF viewer, Firefox, Edge, and mobile readers like Files app, Drive and Dropbox all index and search it. Ctrl+F or Cmd+F finds words within seconds, even in long scanned reports.

Yes. Pass multiple language codes (for example eng+chi_sim+hin) and the OCR considers all of them when reading characters. Mixed-script documents like bilingual menus, international contracts and government forms work cleanly. For best results give the most-likely language first in the list.

The text layer typically adds 5–15% to the PDF size — usually a few hundred kilobytes per 100 pages. Compared to the gain (full-text search across your entire document archive), it is a small price. If size matters for email, run the result through PDF Compress to trim large embedded images further.

Uploads are processed in a temporary working folder and auto-deleted within 24 hours — unless you explicitly share a result, which keeps it at a public link anyone who has it can open for up to 30 days. We never train models on user files, never share them, and never add watermarks. That makes the tool safe for legal, HR, medical and accounting scanned archives where confidentiality matters most.

This tool reads image files (JPG, PNG, TIFF, scans and photos) and returns a searchable PDF. If you already have a multi-page scanned PDF, first split it into page images with the PDF to Images tool, then drop those images here to get one searchable, OCR'd PDF back.

Upload JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF, TIFF or BMP — phone photos, flatbed scans and screenshots all work. The OCR engine reads the text and wraps it in an invisible layer behind the picture, so the result is a normal searchable PDF that opens in any viewer.

A searchable PDF needs an invisible text layer positioned word-by-word over the scan, and only Engine 1 and Engine 2 can produce that layer — the 'Default' engine used elsewhere in the app can't. Engine 1 has the widest language support; Engine 2 can do better on stylised or lower-quality scans.

Open the Language picker in Settings and choose the document's language (English by default) — this is the single most important setting for OCR accuracy, since the engine's character recognition is language-specific. Click Re-run conversion after changing it to rebuild the PDF with a fresh text layer.

Pick Engine 1 for its broader language coverage, and set the Language picker to the contract's primary language. If key sections in a second language still aren't matching when you search, re-run the conversion with Engine 2 or the secondary language selected on a second pass.

It updates automatically — switching the Engine or Language dropdown immediately reprocesses the uploaded image and rebuilds the searchable PDF with the new setting, with no click required. The Re-run conversion button is mainly useful for retrying the exact same settings again, for example after a failed conversion or a brief network drop.

If Ctrl+F finds nothing, the PDF is almost certainly a scan — the pages are pictures with no text underneath. Run the file through this searchable PDF converter: OCR reads every page and adds an invisible text layer, so search, highlighting and copy-paste start working in any viewer. The visible pages stay pixel-for-pixel the same.

You don't need Acrobat or installed software. Upload the scan, preview the searchable result before signup, then create a free account to download the standard PDF and use the signed-in free allowance. The output opens in any PDF viewer.

Yes — Pixoate supports batch and bulk processing. Switch to Batch mode, add up to 60 images on Premium or 200 on Pro, set your options once, and every image is processed with the same settings before you download a single ZIP. Bulk processing is a Premium feature; the output uses the same quality and settings as single mode.

Yes — with bulk processing you configure the settings a single time and they apply to every item in the batch — up to 60 images on Premium or 200 on Pro. There is no need to repeat the setup per item, and Temporary uploaded and generated files are processed securely and deleted automatically.