SnipPDF

OCR PDFBeta

Make a scanned PDF searchable. Text becomes selectable and copyable, image stays identical.

Processed on our servers Learn more

This tool is in beta. Quality may vary on complex layouts, admin forms, or non-standard fonts. Free OCR/OSS engines have real limits — see the FAQ below for what we do and don't guarantee. For pixel-perfect results, Adobe Acrobat remains the reference.
What OCR does — and does not: The image of your PDF stays exactly the same. What changes is invisible: a text layer is added on top so you can select, copy and Ctrl+F search the words. If the output looks identical to the input, that's the point — try selecting text with your mouse.
Recognition language

Pick the language(s) that appear in the document. Mixed packs recognize both, at a small quality cost.

Upload a file to continue.

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How it works

Drop a scanned PDF, pick the language, click Start. We straighten and clean each page, run text recognition on it, and rebuild the PDF with the ORIGINAL images preserved plus an invisible text layer on top. You get a document that looks exactly like the source but where the text is now selectable, copyable and searchable.

Common use cases

  • Turn a scanned contract or letter into a searchable PDF you can Ctrl+F through and quote from.
  • Digitize a book chapter or a receipt so it appears in your local search and cloud indexes.
  • Recover the text from a smartphone photo of a printed page (letter, prescription, form) after we straighten and clean it up.

Privacy

OCR PDF sends your file to our service for processing. See the file-handling page for details.

Combined workflows

Most people pair OCR PDF with PDF to Word, Compress PDF and PDF info.

FAQ

How accurate is the recognition?

On clean printed scans: 95-99% for English, 93-97% for French, 85-92% for Arabic — competitive with paid tools. On smartphone photos: 85-92% with our preprocessing. Handwriting is NOT supported — the tool works on printed text only.

Will the result look like my original PDF?

Yes — exactly. Unlike PDF → Word, OCR keeps the original page images and just adds an invisible text layer on top. The visual output is identical to the source, only now the text is selectable.

Which language should I pick?

The one(s) actually in the document. Mixed packs (French + Arabic, French + English) recognize both languages in the same page — useful for administrative documents. Recognition is slightly slower and slightly less accurate than a single-language pack.

Can it read handwritten notes?

No. Our OCR only handles printed text. For handwriting you need a specialized service like Google Cloud Vision — we don't ship handwriting recognition.

Is my file sent to the server?

Yes. OCR runs on our server. Your PDF is deleted from disk as soon as the searchable PDF is returned — no copy is kept.