1Upload the scanned PDF documents; a clean 300 DPI grayscale scan gives the recogniser the most to work with.
2Tell it which language to expect — naming the language beats letting it guess by a wide margin.
3Run the recognition pass; the words are written back as an invisible layer sitting over the original page image.
4Download the searchable PDF file — it looks identical, but you can now search and select the text in it.
OCR PDF FAQ
Which languages can it recognise?
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Over 100, including Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the Indic scripts. Telling it which language to expect materially improves accuracy over letting it guess.
How accurate is it?
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On a clean 300 DPI scan of printed text, high enough that errors are rare and mostly in unusual proper nouns. Accuracy falls off sharply with low resolution, skew, shadows from a phone camera, unusual typefaces and handwriting — handwriting in particular is not what this is for.
What should I scan at for the best result?
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300 DPI in grayscale is the sweet spot. Below 200 DPI character shapes start breaking down; above 400 DPI you gain almost nothing and pay for it in file size and processing time.
How does OCR PDF turn a scan into text?
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Concretely, each page is rendered, run through a Tesseract text-recognition pass in over 100 languages, and the recognised words are written back as an invisible text layer positioned over the original image — so the page looks unchanged but is searchable and selectable. The page still looks exactly as it did — the recognised text sits invisibly behind the image so search and selection work without changing the appearance.
Can I run OCR PDF on several PDF documents at once?
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Yes — upload the set and they process in parallel under one set of settings, which is the point of doing a document workflow here rather than clicking through a desktop reader.
Does OCR PDF cost anything?
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No. OCR PDF is free without an account, and nothing is stamped onto the pages. Uploaded documents are deleted from the workers shortly after the job completes.
What can I upload to OCR PDF?
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Any standard PDF, including ones produced by a scanner, by a word processor or by a print driver. Files with an owner password that only restricts editing are handled; files that need a user password to open are not, and we do not attempt to break encryption.
Will OCR PDF lower the quality of my PDF documents?
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Text and vector artwork are objects rather than pixels, so they stay perfectly sharp at any zoom no matter what happens. Only the embedded raster images can degrade, and only if the operation you chose resamples them.
Does OCR PDF belong on a site about a photo format?
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JPEG.to is built around the format that carries nearly every photograph in existence — thirty years old, opened by literally everything, and still the right default for a photographic image. The jobs people bring here are the ones a photograph collects over its life — too big to email, wrong dimensions for a form, wrong way up out of a phone. OCR PDF runs on the same upload and the same account as the conversions because that is where those jobs land.
What is the sensible next step after OCR PDF?
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The converter on this site moves images to and from JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC, which is where the trade between file size and one more generation of loss gets settled. Deciding the format last rather than first is the whole point: every extra save of a photographic image is another generation, and the fewer of them you spend, the more of the picture survives.
Is this the same engine as the other converter sites?
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Yes — the same libraries, the same workers, the same caps. The difference is which advice is on the page, and here that advice is built on one property of the format the site is named after: the .jpeg and .jpg extensions are the same bitstream, so nothing here behaves differently from a .jpg — only the filename changes.
Is anything kept, and do I need to sign in?
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Nothing is kept and no account is needed. Uploads are removed from the workers shortly after the job finishes; nothing is looked at, listed or indexed. An account buys history and larger batches, not access.
