How to OCR a PDF in Adobe Acrobat

Updated on:

June 5, 2026

By:

Madhav Bhandari

Use this interactive demo to learn how to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on a PDF in Adobe Acrobat.

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In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to ocr a pdf in Adobe Acrobat:

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Open your PDF in Adobe Acrobat.
On the right-side pane, click Scan & OCR.
On the tools above, click Recognize Text and click In this file.
Click Recognize text.
Wait until the process is done.‍
Save your file to preserve the searchable/editable texts.

📌 Why this matters

OCR transforms image-based PDFs into searchable, editable documents, letting you copy text, search for specific content, and make corrections directly. Beyond basic functionality, OCR-enabled PDFs integrate seamlessly with digital workflows—screen readers can access the content for accessibility compliance, automated systems can extract data for processing, and search engines can index the text for discovery.

This conversion essentially bridges the gap between static scanned documents and dynamic digital content, making your PDFs truly functional rather than just viewable images.

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