Turn a scanned, photo-based PDF into editable, searchable text with free in-browser OCR — no upload, no software, no signup.
Why you cannot edit a scanned PDF directly
A scan is a photograph of a page. To your computer it is pixels, not words — there is nothing to place a cursor in. OCR (optical character recognition) reads those pixels and reconstructs the actual text, fonts and positions.
Make it editable in three steps
Open the OCR Scanned PDF tool and add your scan — the OCR runs locally in your browser, so the document never leaves your device.
Wait for recognition to finish; detected text regions appear over the page.
Click any text to correct or rewrite it, then download the updated PDF.
Getting the best OCR accuracy
Scan at 300 DPI in black and white for documents. Keep the page straight — skewed scans lose accuracy fast. Clean printed text recognizes at well over 95%; handwriting is not reliably supported by any consumer OCR.
Searchable vs editable
Sometimes you only need to find things, not change them. OCR also makes the document searchable, so you can Ctrl+F a 100-page scan instead of reading it. If you need to fix a date or a name, edit the recognized text and export — the layout is preserved.