PDF Not Searchable? Make Your PDF Text Selectable
If you can't search, select, or copy text from a PDF, it's almost certainly a scanned document. The pages are stored as images, not real text. PDFJolt's free OCR tool adds an invisible text layer so you can search with Ctrl+F, select text, and copy-paste — all without uploading your file to any server.
Why Your PDF Isn't Searchable: Text Layers vs. Scanned Pages
PDFs store content in two fundamentally different ways. A native PDF (created digitally from Word, Google Docs, or a web page) contains actual text data — characters, fonts, and positions. You can search, select, and copy this text because the PDF viewer reads it directly.
A scanned PDF is different. When you scan a paper document or photograph a page, the result is an image — a grid of pixels. The PDF wraps that image in a PDF container, but there's no underlying text data. To your PDF viewer, each page is a picture. That's why Ctrl+F finds nothing and your cursor can't select any words.
How to Tell If Your PDF Is Scanned
Quick test
Open the PDF and try to select a word. If your cursor shows a text-selection I-beam and highlights the word, it has a text layer. If nothing highlights or you get a crosshair cursor, it's scanned.
Ctrl+F test
Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) and search for a word you can see on the page. If the search returns "0 results" for a word that's clearly visible, the PDF is image-based and needs OCR.
How OCR Makes Your PDF Searchable
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) analyzes the images in your PDF, identifies letters and words, and creates a text layer that sits invisibly over each page. The result is a searchable PDF — it looks exactly like the original, but now supports text search, selection, and copy-paste.
PDFJolt uses Tesseract.js, the most widely-used open-source OCR engine, running entirely in your browser via WebAssembly. Each page is rendered at 300 DPI for maximum recognition accuracy, processed through the OCR engine, and reassembled with the new text layer. Confidence scores help you verify accuracy.
Open PDFJolt's free OCR tool in your browser.
Upload your non-searchable PDF file.
Select the document language and enable 'Searchable PDF' output.
Click Extract Text — your searchable PDF is ready to download.
100% private OCR processing
PDFJolt processes your scanned documents entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to any server — unlike Adobe Acrobat, Google Drive, and online OCR services that process documents on their cloud infrastructure. Safe for bank statements, legal documents, medical records, and tax forms.
Frequently Asked Questions
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