Make scanned PDFs searchable.
OCR adds an invisible text layer to your scanned PDF — so you can Ctrl-F through it, copy quotes, and paste into other documents. The visual appearance stays exactly the same.
OCR a PDF →Available on Pro (€9.99/mo), Business (€49.99/mo), and Enterprise. EU-hosted, files deleted after 1 hour.
How it works
Common questions
What's "OCR" again?
Optical Character Recognition. It takes pixel images of text (scans, photos of documents) and turns them into actual letters a computer can read. We don't change what your PDF LOOKS like — we just add invisible computer-readable text behind the visible image so search and copy work.
Which languages are supported?
English, French, German and Japanese — pick the document's language in the tool for the best accuracy (English is the default). Need another of Tesseract's 100+ languages? Email support@formatly.pro and we'll enable it.
How accurate is it?
Typically 95-99% accurate on clean modern scans. Drops to 80-90% on phone-photographed receipts, handwritten notes, or low-resolution faxes. Best results: 300 DPI scans of printed text. We auto-deskew and auto-rotate pages before OCR to maximise accuracy.
How long does it take?
Roughly 2-5 seconds per page. A 50-page contract takes ~3 minutes. Anything longer than 5 minutes gets cancelled with a clear error — for documents larger than that, split the PDF first or contact us about higher-limit Enterprise processing.
Is there a file size limit?
Pro users get 500 MB per file. Business users get 5 GB. The OCR engine scales to large documents — the limit is just our standard plan tier.