How to make a PDF searchable and copyable on Linux
You don't need special software to make a PDF searchable and copyable on Linux. FernPDF runs entirely in Firefox or Chrome on Linux: open the tool, drop your file, download the result. Text extraction runs on-device. PDFs with an embedded text layer extract exactly; image-only scans need full OCR (roadmap).
No hunting for the right CLI flags or building tools from source. A browser is the only dependency, on any distribution.
Step by step
1Open the OCR PDF tool.
2Drop your PDF.
3Choose the output: a searchable PDF or plain text (.txt).
4Click “Run OCR” and download the result.
No upload · no account · no watermark
FAQ
Common questions
Yes, FernPDF is a web app, so it runs in Firefox or Chrome on Linux with no installation. All processing happens on your device using WebAssembly.
Yes. Every core FernPDF tool is free, with no account, no watermark, and no trial limits.
For PDFs that contain a text layer, extraction is exact: every word is read directly from the document, entirely on-device.
Image-only scans have no text layer to read. Recognising text inside images needs a full OCR engine. That’s on the roadmap; this tool covers every PDF with embedded text today.