Make a scanned PDF searchable
A scan is a picture of a page. Optical character recognition reads the text out of that picture and adds it back as a real text layer, so the document becomes searchable, selectable and usable.
Not available yet
OCR — make a scan searchable is planned for the paid tier. It is not built yet, and there is nothing to buy — when it ships, this page will do the work.
Why this one costs money
Optical character recognition runs on a cloud service, billed per page.
Every tool on this site that runs in your browser is free, because it costs nothing to provide however much you use it. A subscription only makes sense for work that carries a real bill per document. That is the whole rule.
What you can do now
- JPG to PDF — free, no account
- PNG to PDF — free, no account
- PDF to JPG — free, no account
Why this is not free
Recognition quality is the whole product. Cloud OCR services handle skewed pages, poor contrast, mixed languages and handwriting far better than anything that runs locally, and they bill per page. That is a genuine cost for every document processed.
The browser-based tools on this site are free because they cost nothing to run however much they are used. OCR is the opposite: each page has a price attached, so it can only sit behind a paid tier. That distinction is the entire basis for what is free here and what is not.
What you can do with a scan today
Every tool that treats pages as pages already works on scans: you can merge, split, extract, rotate, and add text or annotations on top of them. What you cannot do until this ships is search or select the text inside the scanned image.