A PDF made from a scan or a photo looks like a document but is really just an image — you can't search or copy the text inside it. OCR recognizes the letters in that image and turns them into real text.
Checking whether you need OCR
Open the PDF and search for a word with Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on Mac). If nothing comes up, or dragging over a sentence selects nothing, it's an image-based PDF — OCR is what makes it searchable, copyable, and extractable.
Tips for better accuracy
Low scan resolution or a tilted page both hurt recognition accuracy. Where possible, rotate the page straight before running OCR. Handwriting recognizes far worse than printed text, so always double-check the result on handwritten documents.
What to do after OCR
Once OCR finishes, the PDF itself becomes searchable and copyable. If you want the content in another document, follow up with text extraction.
Checklist
| Symptom | What to do |
|---|---|
| Can't search or copy text | Run OCR |
| Page is tilted | Rotate, then run OCR |
| Want the text in another doc | Extract text after OCR |
🔎 Try it now
FastestPDF's OCR recognizes text in scanned PDFs and turns them into searchable, copyable documents — all processed in your browser.
Open the OCR tool →