Free Online Scan Tools

Scanned documents are just pictures of pages until you add a text layer — you cannot search them, copy from them, or select a paragraph. DocsSeva's scan tools fix that by running OCR (optical character recognition) directly in your browser, rebuilding a scanned PDF as a searchable, selectable file with support for 100+ languages.

The same category also includes a text extractor for pulling clean text out of PDFs, and a 'make scanned PDF' tool that does the opposite — giving a crisp digital document a realistic scanned appearance with grain, a slight skew and grayscale or black-and-white tone, which is useful when a workflow expects a physically scanned copy.

Because OCR and the scan effect both run on your device, your documents are never uploaded. Everything is free, with no account and no watermark.