Drop in a scan. This tool reads the text on every page inside your browser and adds it back as an invisible layer — your pages look exactly the same, but now you can search, highlight and copy.
or choose a file from your device — PDF, JPG or PNG
Pick the document's language and a quality level. The file opens inside this page using your browser's own PDF engine — no upload.
Every page is drawn at high resolution and run through an OCR engine on your device's processor. It finds each word and where it sits on the page.
The original page images are kept, with the recognised words placed invisibly on top. Search with Ctrl+F, select, copy — the pages look unchanged.
Contracts, IDs, invoices, medical and legal records are exactly what ends up scanned. Here they never pass through a third party's server.
Processing uses your own device's memory and processor, so there's no daily quota, no per-page fee and no account to create.
The language data downloads once and your browser keeps it, so the next document starts reading right away.
OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text in a picture of a page. A scanned PDF is just images, so you can't search it or copy from it. This tool recognises the words and adds them to the PDF as a hidden text layer behind the scan.
The result looks identical to your original but supports search, text selection, copy and paste, and screen readers.
No. Your PDF is opened, read and rebuilt entirely inside your browser tab. The only thing downloaded is the OCR engine and the language data for the language you choose — never your document.
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Danish and Indonesian. These all use Latin letters, which can be stored reliably in the hidden text layer.
Scripts such as Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Cyrillic need a different text-layer approach and aren't supported yet. Choosing the wrong language is the most common cause of poor results, so pick the one that matches your document.
No. Each scanned page is saved as an image exactly as it appears, and the recognised text is placed on top as an invisible layer. Layout, fonts, stamps and signatures look the same because they are still the original picture.
The pages are re-saved as images alongside the text layer, so size depends on the quality level and the original's compression. Fast gives the smallest files; Most accurate keeps the sharpest images. If you need the file smaller afterwards, run the result through the YourView Tools PDF compressor.
With Keep pages that already contain text switched on, pages that already have selectable text are copied into the result unchanged, and only the scanned pages are read. Turn it off to re-read every page.
Printed text in columns is handled well, and table text is recognised as words. Handwriting is not reliably recognised by this engine, and very decorative fonts can also produce errors. The text layer keeps the position of each word, so search results still highlight in the right place.
Typically a few seconds per page on a modern laptop. Fast is quickest and Most accurate is slowest. The first run also downloads the language data once. Phones and older devices will be slower.
There's no limit set by this tool, but your browser's memory is the ceiling. For very long documents (hundreds of pages), split them into parts first and process each part. Pages are processed one at a time to keep memory use low.
Not directly. Remove the password in your PDF viewer first (for example, by printing to a new PDF), then drop the unlocked copy in here.
Yes. After processing, use Copy text to put the recognised text on your clipboard, or Download .txt to save it as a plain text file.
Yes, in any modern mobile browser. Phones have less memory, so long or very high-resolution documents may fail; if that happens, try Fast quality or split the file.