Free PDF OCR for searchable plans.
Recognise printed English text in scanned plans and PDFs without uploading your document. KresCAD uses the free, open-source Tesseract OCR engine on your device.
Choose exactly what to recognise
- Selection box: drag a rectangle around a room label, note or schedule.
- Current page: recognise text across the active page.
- Entire document: process every page in the drawing.
How to make a scanned PDF searchable
- Launch KresCAD and open the PDF or image.
- Click OCR in the toolbar.
- Click Scan current page, Scan entire document or Scan a selection. Choose the text direction first if the lettering is sideways.
- When OCR finishes, use Find text at the top right, or Select text to drag over words and copy them. Corrections are optional.
- Choose Export PDF. Search or select the recognised text in a PDF reader that supports text selection.
What is kept in the export?
OCR adds an invisible text layer aligned with the source page. It does not replace the drawing with a screenshot. The original artwork remains visible, and the recognised text is retained in editable KresCAD projects and PDF exports.
Accuracy and language
This release supports English printed text. Clear, high-resolution scans work best. Faint lettering, handwriting, dense linework and unusual fonts can produce errors. Review important words and every dimension before relying on the result. Low-confidence results are highlighted for review.
No paid AI service or document upload
The OCR engine and language data download from KresCAD when needed. Recognition runs locally in your browser, with no per-page OCR charge. The engine download needs a connection; processing a large plan may take longer depending on your device.
Does your PDF need OCR?
Try selecting a word in the original PDF. If it already has selectable text, use Find text or Select text in KresCAD without running OCR. Scanned pages that contain only an image need recognition to become searchable. A selection scan is useful when you only need a room label or a note from a busy plan.
Continue with PDF markup, scaled 2D drawing or PDF plan measurement in the same workspace. OCR recognises text; calibrate the page separately before measuring.
Check drawing scale, measurements, recognised text and exported results before use.