1Upload the scanned PDF documents; a clean 300 DPI grayscale scan gives the recogniser the most to work with.
2Tell it which language to expect — naming the language beats letting it guess by a wide margin.
3Run the recognition pass; the words are written back as an invisible layer sitting over the original page image.
4Download the searchable PDF file — it looks identical, but you can now search and select the text in it.
OCR PDF FAQ
How does OCR PDF turn a scan into text?
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Concretely, each page is rendered, run through a Tesseract text-recognition pass in over 100 languages, and the recognised words are written back as an invisible text layer positioned over the original image — so the page looks unchanged but is searchable and selectable. The page still looks exactly as it did — the recognised text sits invisibly behind the image so search and selection work without changing the appearance.
Which languages can it recognise?
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Over 100, including Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the Indic scripts. Telling it which language to expect materially improves accuracy over letting it guess.
Does the source format affect recognition?
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It does. PDF fixes the page: fonts, vectors, raster images and text coordinates are frozen so every reader sees identical layout. How the page is stored decides what resolution and colour information the recogniser has to work with.
Anything specific to PDF here?
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Yes — a PDF is an object graph, not a page image, so text stays selectable and vectors stay sharp no matter what happens to the raster content inside it. It affects what the recogniser can see.
How accurate is it?
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On a clean 300 DPI scan of printed text, high enough that errors are rare and mostly in unusual proper nouns. Accuracy falls off sharply with low resolution, skew, shadows from a phone camera, unusual typefaces and handwriting — handwriting in particular is not what this is for.
What should I scan at for the best result?
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300 DPI in grayscale is the sweet spot. Below 200 DPI character shapes start breaking down; above 400 DPI you gain almost nothing and pay for it in file size and processing time.
What can I upload to OCR PDF?
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Any standard PDF, including ones produced by a scanner, by a word processor or by a print driver. Files with an owner password that only restricts editing are handled; files that need a user password to open are not, and we do not attempt to break encryption.
Is there a file size limit on OCR PDF?
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Yes: free accounts process documents up to 25 MB each, which covers most reports and contracts but not a long scanned document at 600 DPI; Ghostscript and qpdf do the work. Scanned PDFs are the usual thing that exceeds it, and compressing the document first is normally enough to bring it back under.
Will OCR PDF lower the quality of my PDF documents?
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Text and vector artwork are objects rather than pixels, so they stay perfectly sharp at any zoom no matter what happens. Only the embedded raster images can degrade, and only if the operation you chose resamples them.
Can I run OCR PDF on several PDF documents at once?
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Yes — upload the set and they process in parallel under one set of settings, which is the point of doing a document workflow here rather than clicking through a desktop reader.
Do bookmarks, links and form fields survive?
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Outlines, internal links and annotations are preserved wherever the operation allows it. Digital signatures are the exception: any change to the file necessarily invalidates a signature, because that is precisely what a signature is for.
Does OCR PDF cost anything?
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No. OCR PDF is free without an account, and nothing is stamped onto the pages. Uploaded documents are deleted from the workers shortly after the job completes.
