Image to Searchable PDF - OCR Text Layer Generator

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 minutes of the conversion completing. 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.

Searchable PDF needs an embedded hOCR text layer with per-word bounding boxes, which only the Tesseract-based engines (Engine 1 and Engine 2) can produce — the PaddleOCR 'Default' engine used elsewhere in the app can't generate that layer. Engine 1 is the standard Tesseract pass with 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.