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You scanned last year’s forms, or a parent emailed you a scan of a 1099. Now you want to find the box with the federal tax withheld, or copy your employer’s name, and nothing happens: the PDF is just an image. OCR reads the words on every scanned page and adds them as an invisible text layer. The pages look the same, but you can search, select and copy the text.
How to make your scan searchable
- Open OCR PDF.
- Drop one or more PDFs into the box or click to choose them. Only have a photo? Turn it into a PDF with JPG to PDF first.
- Check the language under “Language of the document”. English is ticked. Is the form in Spanish too? Tick Español as well; you can choose up to 3. Each language is downloaded once, the first time you use it.
- Choose Skip pages with text or All pages. Skip pages with text only recognizes scans, so pages that already have text aren’t done twice.
- Click Make searchable. It takes a few seconds per page; a long scan can take minutes. Keep the tab open.
- Download the PDF and test it. Press Ctrl+F and search for a word you can see on the page.
Check the numbers yourself
Text recognition isn’t flawless. A blurry or skewed scan, small print, tables and unusual fonts cause mistakes, and handwriting usually fails. Numbers are the tricky part: a 5 can become an S, a 0 an O, a 1 an l. Before you copy an amount, an EIN or an account number from the recognized text, compare it with the form itself.
Tips for a better result
- Scan at 300 dpi in black and white or grey, and keep the page straight.
- Turn sideways pages first with Rotate PDF: an upside-down page is read as nonsense.
- Choose only the languages the form contains. More languages make it slower and can cause mistakes.
The recognition engine (Tesseract) runs in your browser. It and the language data are downloaded from this site, and your files aren’t uploaded to a server. Verify that no PDF is uploaded shows how to check it yourself.
This guide only covers the PDF work. For questions about what goes on your tax return, ask a tax professional or the IRS.
Frequently asked questions
Does my scan look different afterwards?
No. The pages stay as they were: the recognized text is added as an invisible layer on top, in the right place. The file gets only slightly bigger.
Why are some numbers wrong?
OCR guesses each character from the image. Blurry or skewed scans, very small text, stamps and tables cause mistakes. A clean scan at 300 dpi helps; for tax forms, compare every number you use with the original.
Can it read handwritten numbers?
Usually not. OCR is made for printed text. Handwriting mostly comes out wrong or not at all.
Is my tax form uploaded for the text recognition?
The recognition runs in your browser, so your files aren’t uploaded to a server. You can check it yourself in your browser’s network tab.