You have a stack of scanned contracts, an old book chapter you photographed, or a folder of receipt images. They look like PDFs, but you can't search them, copy text from them, or paste a name into a search box. Welcome to the world of "image PDFs" — and OCR is your way out.

What OCR actually does

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads each page like a person would: it identifies letter shapes, groups them into words, and writes those words as a text layer behind the original image. The page still looks identical — but now it's also searchable, copyable, and editable.

Accuracy expectations

Crisp printed text: 95–99% accuracy
Newspaper/older books: 90–95%
Phone scans of clean documents: 88–94%
Handwriting: 50–80%, depends heavily on the writer
Math/chemistry formulas: Limited — specialized tools work better

Languages we support

Our PDF OCR handles 50+ languages including English, Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi. You can pick multiple languages for documents that mix scripts.

Tips for better OCR results

Use the right language. Selecting "English" on a Turkish document drops accuracy to 60%. Always pick the language you're scanning.
Higher resolution scans = better OCR. 300 DPI is the sweet spot. Below 200 DPI, accuracy drops fast.
Straight pages. If the scan is rotated or skewed, fix it with PDF rotate first.
Clean originals. Coffee stains, fingers in the corner, and dark shadows confuse OCR. Crop the actual page if you can.

What you can do after OCR

Once a scan has a text layer:

Search inside the PDF (Ctrl+F)
Copy text and paste into Word, email, or notes
Convert to Word with PDF to Word
Translate the text content
Make the document accessible to screen readers

Privacy

OCR runs on European servers. Documents are encrypted in transit and deleted after processing. We don't keep, share, or analyze your scans.

OCR Scanned PDFs: How to Make Them Searchable