Tool

OCR PDF

Make scanned PDFs searchable with text recognition.

Coming soon

OCR PDF needs a dedicated text-recognition engine — coming in a later update.

OCR PDF: Make Scanned Documents Searchable and Editable

A scanned page or photographed document is just an image to a computer — you can't search it, copy text from it, or edit a single word without retyping the whole thing. Optical character recognition (OCR) fixes that by recognizing the text inside the image and turning it into real, selectable characters. ConvertBrio's OCR PDF tool is in active development and will bring this capability to every scanned PDF you upload.

What OCR PDF Will Do

Once live, OCR PDF will scan every page of your document, recognize printed text, and layer it back onto the file as searchable, selectable, and copyable text — without changing how the page looks. That means a scanned contract, textbook chapter, or old report becomes something you can search with Ctrl+F, copy quotes from, or run through a text editor.

Why This Matters

Businesses and individuals frequently end up with document archives that are technically digital but functionally unusable — filing cabinets of PDFs that can't be searched or referenced without opening and reading each one manually. OCR turns that archive into something you can actually query, dramatically cutting the time spent hunting for information buried in scanned paperwork.

What You Can Do Right Now

While OCR PDF is being built, ConvertBrio's PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG tools let you export scanned pages as images for viewing or sharing, and PDF to Word can extract text from PDFs that already contain a text layer (as opposed to a pure scanned image). Check back as this feature nears launch, or explore the rest of ConvertBrio's PDF tools in the meantime.

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OCR PDF FAQ

Common questions about ConvertBrio's upcoming OCR PDF tool.

Is OCR PDF available yet?

Not yet — OCR PDF needs a dedicated text-recognition engine that ConvertBrio is currently building. It's coming in a later update.

What will OCR PDF let me do once it launches?

It will recognize printed text inside scanned PDF pages and make it searchable, selectable, and copyable, without changing how the page looks visually.

Can I extract text from a PDF today?

If your PDF already contains a text layer (rather than being a pure scanned image), ConvertBrio's PDF to Word tool can extract that text now. Purely scanned, image-only PDFs will need OCR once it's available.