How to make a scanned PDF searchable
A scanned document is just a picture of text — you can’t search it or copy from it. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the words off the image. With Fudobe it runs in your browser, so even sensitive scans never leave your device.
FREE TOOL · NOTHING UPLOADEDOCR PDF Open it →Steps
Open the free OCR tool and drop your scanned PDF onto it.
Fudobe runs OCR on your device, reading the text page by page.
Review the recognised text.
Save it to your device — no cloud OCR service ever sees your scan.
Questions
Where does the OCR run?+
Entirely in your browser, on your machine. Scans are often the most sensitive documents, so Fudobe never sends them to a cloud service.
Why is it slower than some online tools?+
Because the work happens on your own device instead of a server farm — the trade for keeping the file private. Larger scans take longer.
What languages are supported?+
It uses Tesseract, which recognises a wide range of languages and works best on clear scans.