Free PDF tools: merge PDFs, make scans searchable
Tools for PDF files. A scanned PDF is a stack of pictures: you can read it, but you can't search it, select a sentence or copy a table out of it, and a computer can't index it. The OCR tool reads the text on every page and adds it as an invisible layer behind the page, so the PDF looks exactly as it did but becomes searchable and copyable.
It reads printed and typed text in 22 languages, from English, German, French and Spanish to Russian, Greek, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and turns sideways or upside-down pages upright. Pages that already have text can be left alone, or have an earlier OCR layer replaced.
Photos, screenshots and scanned pictures work too: JPG, PNG, TIFF (with all its pages), WebP, BMP and iPhone HEIC photos become a searchable PDF, and the recognised text also comes as a plain text file, ready to paste into an e-mail or a document.
Merge PDF puts separate papers together into the one PDF that applications, claims and tax returns ask for: PDFs with their pages as they are, photos and scans as pages (JPEGs without being compressed again), and Word, Excel or PowerPoint files laid out as they would print, in the order you choose, with a bookmark for each file and only the pages you need.
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Merge PDF (Beta)
Put PDFs, photos, scans and Word, Excel or PowerPoint files together into one PDF, in the order you choose, with a bookmark for each file.
Opens PDF, JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, AVIF, TIFF, BMP, GIF, DOCX, DOC, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, RTF, TXT → saves PDF
Popular: Combine PDF files into one · Convert JPG to PDF · Convert images to PDF · Convert HEIC to PDF
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OCR PDF (Beta)
Make scanned PDFs searchable and copyable, and get the text out of photos, screenshots and scans (JPG, PNG, TIFF, HEIC and more) in 22 languages.
Opens PDF, JPG, PNG, TIFF, WebP, BMP, HEIC, AVIF → saves PDF, TXT
Popular: Make a Scanned PDF Searchable · Scanned PDF to Text: Copy Text From a Scan · Image to Text: Copy Text From a Photo or Screenshot · JPG to Text: Read the Words in a JPG · German OCR: Read German Scans With Umlauts