OCR PDF Online Free — Make Scanned PDF Searchable

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) detects text in images or scanned documents and converts it to machine-readable, searchable text. The result is a PDF where you can select, copy, and search text.

High-quality 300 DPI scans with clear text achieve 95%+ accuracy. WhiskFile shows a per-page confidence score so you can identify low-accuracy pages. Use deskew and sharpen preprocessing to improve results on poor scans.

WhiskFile OCR supports 40+ languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, and many more. Select your document language for best accuracy.

Basic printed handwriting may be partially recognized, but typed/printed text achieves far higher accuracy. For best handwriting results, use 600 DPI and sharpen preprocessing.

300 DPI is recommended for most documents. Use 150 for fast processing of clean scans, 600 for fine print or degraded originals. Higher DPI is slower but more accurate.

Deskew straightens tilted scans. Denoise removes speckles and noise. Sharpen enhances text edges for better recognition. Grayscale converts color scans which can improve accuracy on some documents.

Yes — enable the Force OCR option in advanced settings. This strips existing text layers and re-processes the document, useful when the existing OCR is inaccurate.

Searchable PDF preserves the original page layout with an invisible text layer — you see the scan but can select/search text. Plain text (.txt) extracts only the recognized text without any formatting.

After OCR, each page gets a confidence score (0-100%) based on word-level recognition accuracy from hOCR data. High scores (90%+) mean reliable text extraction. Low scores indicate poor scan quality — try preprocessing (deskew, sharpen) or higher DPI to improve results.

PDF, JPG, PNG, and TIFF. For PDFs, each page is rendered to a high-resolution image before OCR. For image files, the image is processed directly. All formats produce either a searchable PDF or plain text output.

Enable preprocessing: Deskew straightens tilted pages, Denoise removes speckles, Sharpen enhances text edges, and Grayscale converts color images. Also increase DPI to 600 for fine print. These options are under Advanced settings.

Yes. Files are transferred over TLS encryption, processed in an isolated server environment, and automatically deleted within 1 hour. No human reviews your documents.

Yes. OCR PDF is completely free with no signup, no page limits, and no watermarks. Process documents of any length in 40+ languages.

Yes. OCR PDF works on any device with a modern browser — iPhone, Android, iPad, tablets, Chromebooks, and desktop computers. No app download required. The interface adapts to your screen size automatically.

OCR PDF accepts PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF files as input and produces PDF, TXT output. The maximum file size is 50 MB on the free plan (500 MB for Pro users). There are no page count limits.