Turn a scanned PDF into a searchable one — without uploading the file anywhere. Filoraio runs an open-source OCR engine locally in your browser, reads every page, and writes an invisible text layer back into the PDF that any reader (Acrobat, Preview, Chrome) can search and copy.
Filoraio runs the merge directly inside your browser using a small WebAssembly engine. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is queued, and you can verify it yourself — open your browser’s DevTools, switch to the Network tab, and watch it stay quiet.
They’re read into your browser’s memory through a standard file picker.
The merge runs locally — no request leaves your device while it processes.
The combined PDF lands in your downloads folder, the same way any other download would.
No upload bar, no progress spinner waiting on a server. Works offline once the page is loaded.
OCR takes 3–10 seconds per page on a typical laptop. First-time use in any language downloads a ~10–15 MB model that caches in your browser, so subsequent runs are instant.
Drag the PDF onto the picker or click to choose one. Your file stays in this tab — no upload, no quota, no account.
Pick the language of the text in your document. Filoraio supports twelve languages including English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi — covering ~90% of global content production.
Click Make PDF searchable. You'll see per-page progress as each page is recognised. When it's done, the result downloads as a searchable PDF — the original image is preserved, with selectable text now layered underneath.
Anywhere a scanned PDF needs to become searchable — and the document is too sensitive to upload to a cloud OCR service — this is the tool you reach for.
Run OCR on scanned discovery bundles, depositions, and exhibits so the team can search by keyword inside Acrobat — without uploading privileged client documents to a third-party OCR API.
Make scanned historical documents, archival journal pages, and library microfilm PDFs searchable for keyword-driven research — without paying for ABBYY FineReader or sending files through a paid cloud service.
Process scanned patient records, claim forms, and benefit statements that can't legally leave the organisation's network — OCR runs in the browser, so the data never crosses a boundary.
Make scanned receipts, expense reports, and supplier invoices searchable inside accounting software — automated bookkeeping tools and review queries both rely on text-layer extraction.
OCR FOIA returns, court records, and leaked documents to search for names, dates, and dollar amounts — without trusting the document to a third-party service that might log or retain it.
Take a phone-scanned receipt, a faxed contract, or an inherited document scan and make it searchable — Ctrl+F starts working immediately in any PDF reader.
Four common reasons people search for a way to OCR a PDF — and the exact workflow each one collapses into.
Your client signed the deal in 2009 and you only have a scanned PDF. Ctrl+F finds nothing because the text is locked inside an image. Drop it here, pick English, and ten minutes later you can search every page by keyword — including the indemnification clauses buried on page 147.
The paper you need to cite is a scanned journal PDF — selecting text grabs nothing because there's no text layer. Run OCR, download the searchable copy, and now Cmd+C on a paragraph copies the actual words instead of an image of them.
Your bookkeeping software can't read your Spanish, French, or Italian receipt scans. Pick the right language in the picker, OCR each receipt, and import the resulting PDFs — your software now reads the line items and amounts directly.
You've received 500 pages of scanned documents and need to find every mention of a specific name or date. OCR all of them in your browser — the documents never touch a server, and you can search the resulting PDF in Acrobat by Ctrl+F, or feed it to a tool like Grep or grep.app for batch queries.
Four small habits that turn a good OCR result into an excellent one — especially on tricky scans, low-light captures, or non-Latin scripts.
OCR accuracy drops noticeably when the language is wrong — English models recognise some words in other Latin-script languages but miss accents, ligatures, and language-specific characters. For a mixed-language document, OCR each section with the matching language and combine the results.
The OCR engine works best on scans of at least 200 DPI with clean contrast. Phone photos work but tilt and shadow hurt accuracy — for important documents, prefer a scanner or a phone-scanner app (Adobe Scan, Microsoft Lens) that corrects perspective and contrast before saving the PDF.
If you can already select text by clicking on it in Acrobat or Preview, the PDF has a text layer and OCR will only add a slower, redundant invisible layer underneath. Open the file first — if Ctrl+F finds words, skip this tool.
If the source is too blurry, too low-resolution, or too contrasty for a human to read, the OCR engine will produce garbled output. Run the source through better scanning first (your phone's Adobe Scan app does miracles), or accept that some pages simply won't OCR cleanly.
Side by side with the average online OCR service — including the ones with millions of monthly users.
| Feature | Filoraio | Typical online PDF tools |
|---|---|---|
| Where files are processed | On your device | Uploaded to servers |
| Privacy for confidential documents | Never leaves your browser | Processed and often retained |
| Language coverage on free tier | 12 languages, all free | Often English-only free |
| Watermark on output | None | Often added on free tier |
| Page-count cap on free tier | Unlimited | Often 5–10 pages |
| Account required | No | Often required to download |
Quick answers to the things people ask most often before using this tool.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) reads the pixels of a scanned page and identifies which characters they form, producing machine-readable text. Filoraio's OCR adds that text as an invisible layer to your original PDF — the visible page looks exactly the same, but now Ctrl+F works, you can copy text out, and search engines can index the content.
Yes. No account, no email, no daily quota, and no watermark on the output. The page is supported by ads — never the file you download. OCR as many PDFs as you need.
No. The OCR engine (an open-source OCR engine compiled to WebAssembly) runs entirely in your browser. The PDF is held in your device's RAM while processed and downloads directly back to you. Filoraio's servers never see the file or its text content.
Twelve languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified), and Japanese. The first OCR run in any language downloads a ~10–15 MB OCR language model and caches it in your browser — subsequent runs in the same language are instant.
On clean, well-scanned text at 200+ DPI, accuracy is typically 95–99% for Latin scripts and 90–98% for non-Latin scripts. Lower-quality scans (phone snaps, faxes, low contrast) drop to 70–90%. The underlying OCR engine is the open-source engine behind Google Books and many other large-scale OCR projects, so it's well-tested but not flawless on edge cases.
3–10 seconds per page on a typical modern laptop, plus a one-time ~5 second model download the first time you use a language. A 50-page document at 5 seconds/page takes ~4 minutes total. Older devices and phones are slower (10–15 seconds per page), but everything runs in the background while you keep using your browser.
Yes. The original page image is preserved exactly — OCR adds an invisible text layer underneath the pixels, the same way Adobe's Searchable Image output does. Visually, the PDF is identical to the source. The difference: now you can select, copy, and search the text.
Marginally. The invisible text layer adds a small fraction (typically 1–5%) of the source's size — much less than rasterising would, and far less than converting to Word and back. For a 10 MB scanned PDF, expect a ~10.2–10.5 MB output.
Yes. The OCR runs in your phone's browser — Safari on iOS, Chrome on Android. Long documents take longer than on a desktop (phone CPUs are slower) but everything works the same. The OCR'd PDF saves directly to Files (iOS) or Downloads (Android).
OCR will still run, but adds a redundant text layer underneath the existing one — slightly larger file with no functional gain. Test first: open the PDF, try Ctrl+F or click to select text. If it works, the PDF is already searchable and you can skip this tool.
Filoraio handles owner-restricted PDFs (printing/copying locks) automatically. For PDFs with user passwords (encryption requiring a password to open), unlock the file first with our Unlock PDF tool, then OCR the unlocked output here.
The text is searchable and copyable in any PDF reader — you can Ctrl+F to find it, select it with your cursor, and Cmd+C/Ctrl+C to paste into another app. To edit it visibly inside the PDF itself, run the output through our PDF to Word tool for a fully editable .docx version.
There's no hard cap. The OCR runs in your browser's memory — the practical limit is your device's RAM. Most browsers handle 100–200 page documents without issue. For very long scans (500+ pages), the limit is patience: ~50 minutes of processing at 6 seconds per page.
Our OCR recognises *printed* text — handwriting is a different machine-learning problem with its own dedicated tools (HTR, or Handwritten Text Recognition). Some very neat block-printing might be recognised, but cursive and typical handwriting will produce garbled output. For handwritten documents, dedicated HTR services like Transkribus are the right tool.
Tools picked because they pair naturally with the one above — the next step in a typical PDF workflow.