1Upload the scanned PDF documents; a clean 300 DPI grayscale scan gives the recogniser the most to work with.
2Tell it which language to expect — naming the language beats letting it guess by a wide margin.
3Run the recognition pass; the words are written back as an invisible layer sitting over the original page image.
4Download the searchable PDF file — it looks identical, but you can now search and select the text in it.
OCR PDF FAQ
What should I scan at for the best result?
+
300 DPI in grayscale is the sweet spot. Below 200 DPI character shapes start breaking down; above 400 DPI you gain almost nothing and pay for it in file size and processing time.
Which languages can it recognise?
+
Over 100, including Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the Indic scripts. Telling it which language to expect materially improves accuracy over letting it guess.
Does the source format affect recognition?
+
It does. PDF fixes the page: fonts, vectors, raster images and text coordinates are frozen so every reader sees identical layout. How the page is stored decides what resolution and colour information the recogniser has to work with.
Anything specific to PDF here?
+
Yes — a PDF is an object graph, not a page image, so text stays selectable and vectors stay sharp no matter what happens to the raster content inside it. It affects what the recogniser can see.
Will OCR PDF lower the quality of my PDF documents?
+
Text and vector artwork are objects rather than pixels, so they stay perfectly sharp at any zoom no matter what happens. Only the embedded raster images can degrade, and only if the operation you chose resamples them.
Can I run OCR PDF on several PDF documents at once?
+
Yes — upload the set and they process in parallel under one set of settings, which is the point of doing a document workflow here rather than clicking through a desktop reader.
Do bookmarks, links and form fields survive?
+
Outlines, internal links and annotations are preserved wherever the operation allows it. Digital signatures are the exception: any change to the file necessarily invalidates a signature, because that is precisely what a signature is for.
Does OCR PDF cost anything?
+
No. OCR PDF is free without an account, and nothing is stamped onto the pages. Uploaded documents are deleted from the workers shortly after the job completes.
Why does a WebM site host OCR PDF?
+
WEBM.to is built around the container the open web actually chose — VP9 or AV1 with Opus audio, decoded natively by every modern browser and needing no plugin, licence or player. Video is the case where extra round trips hurt most — the files are large and every upload costs real minutes. Running OCR PDF on the same pipeline as the conversions means one upload covers the whole job instead of one upload per tool.
What should I do with the result once OCR PDF is finished?
+
The converter on this site moves video between WebM, MP4, MKV, MOV and the rest, or pulls the soundtrack out entirely, without another upload. Sequencing it that way matters more for video than anywhere else: each re-encode is another generation, so the fewer of them stand between the source and the file you publish, the better it looks.
Is OCR PDF here the same tool the sibling sites run?
+
The engines are shared — the same ffmpeg build with x264, x265 and libvpx, the same workers, the same limits. What a WebM site adds is a view on containers and codecs: which combinations play everywhere, which need a re-encode and which can simply be copied across. It also starts from one fact about the format this site is named after: WebM is VP9 or AV1 with Opus audio, which browsers decode natively but which most desktop editors still transcode on import.
Do I need an account, and does anything get kept?
+
No account, and nothing is kept: uploaded video is deleted from the workers shortly after the job finishes, nothing is watched and nothing is indexed. Free accounts exist for history and batch size, not for access.
