How to OCR a PDF on Windows

Windows comes with Microsoft Edge pre-installed, which is a fully capable browser for running LazyPDF's Tesseract.js OCR engine. You don't need to download Chrome or any other software — Edge handles everything. Alternatively, if Chrome is your default browser, it works equally well. Both browsers fully support the Web Workers API that Tesseract.js uses for background processing, meaning the browser stays responsive while OCR runs. Follow these steps.

1. 1Open Microsoft Edge or Chrome on your Windows PC and go to lazy-pdf.com/en/ocr
2. 2Click 'Choose File' or drag your scanned PDF from File Explorer directly into the browser drop zone
3. 3Select the document language from the dropdown — choosing the correct language (English, French, German, Spanish, etc.) improves Tesseract accuracy
4. 4Click 'Run OCR' and watch the progress bar — Tesseract.js processes each page locally on your PC, then click 'Download PDF' to save the searchable result

Windows includes a built-in 'Windows Scan' app (available free from the Microsoft Store) that works with most USB and network scanners. After scanning a document, Windows Scan saves it as a JPEG, PNG, or PDF to your Pictures or Documents folder. If you scan to PDF format, you can immediately open lazy-pdf.com/en/ocr in Edge and drag the scanned PDF from File Explorer into the drop zone. If your scanner saves as JPEG (a common default), first use LazyPDF's Image to PDF tool to convert the image to PDF, then run OCR. For multi-page documents, Windows Scan can save all pages as a single multi-page PDF, which LazyPDF processes all at once.

Windows users have several OCR options, each with tradeoffs. Microsoft OneNote (included with Microsoft 365) can extract text from images and PDFs, but doesn't produce a searchable PDF — it dumps the text into a note. Microsoft Word can open PDFs and run OCR during the conversion, but the output is a DOCX document with significant formatting loss, not a PDF. Adobe Acrobat Pro has excellent OCR and keeps the PDF format, but costs around $15-20 per month. Google Drive can OCR a PDF by opening it with Google Docs, but uploads your file to Google's servers. LazyPDF is the only option that produces a standard searchable PDF, runs locally without uploading your file, and is completely free.

Most Windows users store files in OneDrive, which syncs to a local folder in File Explorer under your user account. OneDrive files that are locally synced can be dragged directly from File Explorer into the LazyPDF browser tab. For OneDrive files that are online-only (shown with a cloud icon in File Explorer), right-click and choose 'Always keep on this device' to download them first, then use them in LazyPDF. After OCR, the downloaded searchable PDF can be moved into your OneDrive folder to sync across all your devices — it will be searchable on any device that has a PDF viewer supporting text search, not just Windows.

Once you've downloaded the OCR-processed PDF, verify it works by opening it in Edge's built-in PDF viewer. Press Ctrl+F to open the search bar and type a word from the document — Edge should highlight matches. You can also right-click on text in the PDF and choose 'Copy' to extract it. If you use Adobe Acrobat Reader (free), open the PDF there and use Edit → Find to search. Windows Search (the taskbar search) will also index the text layer in PDFs stored in indexed locations like Documents or Downloads, so you can search for document content directly from the Windows Start menu after the index updates — usually within a few minutes of saving the file.