OCR software recognizes shapes it’s been trained to recognize. Point it at a language it doesn’t know, and it doesn’t fail loudly — it does its best to match what it sees to characters it does know, and hands back text that looks plausible at a glance and is actually nonsense. Worth knowing exactly what’s supported before you rely on the output.
What this tool currently supports
OCR PDF recognizes English and Hindi text. A scanned document in either of those languages gets accurate recognition, added as an invisible, searchable layer under the original page image — the page still looks like your scan, but the text becomes selectable and findable with Ctrl/Cmd+F.
What happens if you run another language through it
A document in Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Chinese, or any language outside that pair still gets processed — the tool doesn’t detect the language and refuse, because that’s a genuinely hard problem to get right for every possible script. What comes back instead is text the recognizer produced by matching character shapes it knows against a language it doesn’t, which for a Latin-alphabet language like Spanish or French can produce output that’s partially right (shared letters recognize; accented characters and language-specific spelling often don’t) and for a non-Latin script like Arabic or Chinese is essentially meaningless.
The practical tell: search for a word you know is on the page after OCR finishes. If Ctrl/Cmd+F doesn’t find it, or finds it as scrambled characters, the recognition didn’t actually work for that language, regardless of what the tool returned.
What to do if your document is in another language
- A short document — retype it. For a page or two, this is genuinely faster than fighting inaccurate OCR output and manually correcting every error.
- A long document you need searchable, not editable — most PDF readers built into browsers and operating systems (Chrome, Adobe Reader, macOS Preview) include their own OCR or text-layer features for a wider range of languages than any single online tool. Worth checking what’s already on your device before assuming you need a new tool entirely.
- A document you need translated, not just made searchable — OCR and translation are separate problems; getting text out of the image with the right tool, then translating it separately, gives more reliable results than expecting one step to do both.
Mixed-language documents
If a document is mostly English or Hindi with occasional words in another language — a name, a place, a technical term — the supported-language text around it will still recognize correctly; only the foreign-language words themselves may come through wrong. This is usually a minor, spot-fixable issue rather than a reason to avoid OCR entirely.
Once your document is in a supported language
The rest of the workflow is unchanged: OCR PDF makes the text searchable and selectable, and from there you can convert it to an editable Word document or compress the result if the scan is large.
Ready? Try the free OCR PDF tool now — no sign-up, no watermark, and your file is never stored.