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OCR PDF - Turn scanned PDFs into searchable docs. No uploads.

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Make PDF searchable online with free OCR. Convert scanned PDFs to text-searchable documents. No upload, no size limit, 100% private client-side processing. Translate scanned text easily.

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Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I'm excited to share Make PDF Searchable OCR. a tool I built because "scanned PDFs" are basically digital paperweights. The problem: Every time I received a scanned PDF - contracts, invoices, research papers, legal documents. I couldn't search, copy, or highlight anything. It was just a collection of flat images. And every "free" OCR tool required uploading sensitive documents to sketchy servers. The solution: A PDF OCR tool that runs 100% in your browser. powered by Tesseract.js compiled to WebAssembly: 🔍 Searchable & Selectable — Turns flat scanned images into documents you can Ctrl+F, copy text from, and highlight. The OCR engine identifies letters, words, and layouts, then overlays an invisible text layer exactly on top of the original image. 🛡️ Zero-trust architecture — Absolutely no PDF files, image arrays, or extracted characters are ever transmitted to external servers. We use PDF.js for rendering, Tesseract.js WebAssembly for OCR, and pdf-lib for layer embedding — all in your browser's sandboxed RAM. 🌍 Multi-language support — Supports English, Spanish, French, German, and Hindi. The WebAssembly engine loads optimized language packs dynamically. 📄 Page range filtering — Target specific page ranges (e.g., bypass cover pages) to save processing time. 📦 No file size limits — Process massive PDFs limited only by your device's memory. No upload bottlenecks. 🆓 100% free — No limits. No watermarks. No sign-up. No "upgrade to pro." Who is this for? Legal professionals making contracts searchable Students and researchers working with scanned academic papers Accountants processing invoices and financial statements Anyone who's ever been frustrated by a scanned PDF they couldn't search The key insight: Most "free" OCR tools upload your documents to servers where they're queued, decoded, and stored. For legal briefs, contracts, or tax records, this introduces severe data leak risks. We process everything offline in your local browser sandbox. I'd love your feedback! Try it out and let me know what you think.

Love the no upload approach, feels great for privacy. One thing that would seal the deal for me is adding OCR so I can convert scanned PDFs into searchable text or editable Word files right in the browser. Right now I have to bounce to another tool for that step, and it would be amazing to keep everything in one place.

Maker

 You can now convert scanned PDFs into searchable text or editable files directly in your browser, maintaining the exact same 100% private, no-upload approach you love. no more bouncing to other tools—everything is now in one place. Give it a spin and let us know how it works for you! 🙌

I do like the client-side processing, but would this work offline? If not I would honestly have a hard time trusting it. Also how can I be sure this is thoroughly catching everything?

It is a good idea, also helps reduce input token usage for LLMs to pass thru this before processing.