Recognize text in scanned documents that mix several languages — automatically detects the language of each page (or lets you choose), without changing how the pages look.
Text recognition (OCR) runs entirely in your browser — the page images never leave your computer. In "Auto-detect" mode, each page is first read quickly with each candidate language to pick the one that best recognizes that page's text, and only then is it read at full quality with the chosen language — you can always correct the choice manually in the "Language per page" table. An invisible text layer is added, aligned with what's drawn on each page, so the PDF becomes selectable and searchable without changing a single pixel of its original appearance. Large documents or ones with many candidate languages may take several minutes. Works best with upright pages: if a page is sideways or upside down, first use the Rotate pages tool to straighten it before making it searchable.
Choose the image-only document that needs text recognition.
Select the language of the text in the document (Portuguese, English, Spanish and more), or combine more than one language if the document mixes them.
The text is recognized according to the chosen language and inserted as a searchable layer over the original image.
The OCR engine uses language-specific dictionaries and patterns to recognize letters more accurately — choosing the wrong language (for example, English for a document in Portuguese) significantly increases recognition errors, especially with accents and special characters.
Yes, you can select several languages at the same time, and the OCR engine will try to correctly recognize the text in each of them.
OCR is optimized for printed text; handwriting usually has a much lower and less reliable recognition rate, regardless of the language chosen.
No. All processing happens inside your own browser — the file never leaves your computer or passes through any external server. You can confirm this by disconnecting from the internet once the page has loaded: the tool keeps working normally.
No. PDFsy doesn't ask for sign-up, an account or payment — just open the page and use the tool.
Yes. PDFsy offers PDF tools equivalent to iLovePDF's — merge, convert, compress, protect and much more — available in 25 languages, with no usage limits, no need to create an account, and 100% local processing in your browser, without uploading any file to any server.