Sign in
All tools

OCR a scanned PDF

Read the text in scanned PDFs in English, Hindi, Tamil and six more Indian languages, so you can search, copy and even edit it.

Your signature

Sign with your finger or mouse.

Document

Page numbers
Header and footer

You can use {page}, {pages}, {date} and {file}.

Watermark
Bookmarks
    Password and info

    Protected with AES-256. Opened a protected PDF? It's saved without its old password unless you set one here.

    Scanned pages (OCR)

    Reads the text in scanned pages so you can search, copy and edit it. It runs on your device; the first run downloads the reader (about 7 MB).

    Compare with another PDF

    Highlights the words that differ from another version of this document.

    Sign in to download

    Downloading needs a free FitMyKB account. Your edits stay right here while you sign in, in a new tab.

    We never store your PDF. It's edited on your device and never uploaded. Your account only holds your name and email.

    Find and replace

    Replaces the PDF's own text, keeping its font where every letter exists in it.

    What OCR does

    A scanned PDF is a photo of each page, so you can't search it, copy from it or change it. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in those photos. The text is added as an invisible layer exactly over the words, so the page looks the same but works like a normal PDF.

    Indian languages

    Choose English, Hindi, or English together with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati or Marathi. Mixed documents such as government forms read best with both languages selected. The reader runs on your device; the first time it downloads its language data, a few MB.

    Edit the scanned text

    After OCR, choose Edit text: each scanned line can be clicked and retyped. The old words are covered in the paper's own colour and your text is typed on top in a matching size and ink colour, which is handy for correcting a date or a spelling in an old scan.

    Use cases

    Scanned documents you need to search

    Make a scanned agreement, a book chapter or old records searchable and copyable.

    Indian languages

    Recognise text in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati and Marathi as well as English.

    Before converting to Word

    Run OCR on a scan first, then convert it with PDF to Word to get editable text.

    How it works

    1. Open the scanned PDF and press Document (the page icon), then Scanned pages (OCR).

    2. Choose the language and press Read the text.

    3. Download a searchable PDF, or use Edit text to correct scanned lines first.

    Questions

    How accurate is it?

    Clear, straight scans of printed text read very well. Handwriting, very small print and blurred phone photos read less reliably.

    Is there a page limit?

    No limit; each page takes a few seconds on a phone and less on a computer.

    Are my scans uploaded for OCR?

    No. The text is read by your own browser; nothing is sent to a server.

    Which pages does it read?

    By default only pages with no text, so typed PDFs aren't read twice. Choose All pages to read everything.

    Related tools

    Edit the text in a PDFClick any line of a PDF and change the words. The new text uses the PDF's own font whenever it can, and the old words are really removed. Hindi PDF editorType Hindi into any PDF, fix Hindi text in forms and letters, and make scanned Hindi pages searchable, with correct matras and conjuncts. Compress a PDFMake scanned and image-heavy PDFs much smaller by re-compressing the pictures inside them. Free PDF editorEdit the PDF's own text, sign, fill forms, redact, add photos, number pages and more, right in your browser. Your PDF never leaves your device.