Feature

PDF OCR in 14 Indian languages — in your browser

Turn scanned pages and photos into selectable, searchable text in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and ten more languages — without your files ever leaving your device.

Most Indian offices, courts, and small businesses live on scanned documents — a photographed invoice, a scanned affidavit, a faxed purchase order. The text on those pages is locked inside an image: you can see it, but you cannot select, copy, or search it. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) unlocks that text, and MayaPDF does it for 14 Indian languages right inside your web browser.

Which Indian languages are supported?

MayaPDF recognises text in these languages, plus English:

हिन्दी (Hindi)தமிழ் (Tamil)বাংলা (Bengali) తెలుగు (Telugu)मराठी (Marathi)ગુજરાતી (Gujarati) ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada)മലയാളം (Malayalam)ਪੰਜਾਬੀ (Punjabi) ଓଡ଼ିଆ (Odia)অসমীয়া (Assamese)नेपाली (Nepali) संस्कृत (Sanskrit)اردو (Urdu)

You can OCR a mixed English + Indian-language document — for example a bilingual government form — and MayaPDF will pick up both scripts.

Your files never leave your device

This is the part that matters most for sensitive documents. MayaPDF's OCR runs entirely in your browser using a self-hosted recognition engine (Tesseract, compiled to WebAssembly, served from our own servers — no third-party OCR API is called). When you OCR a scanned contract or an Aadhaar-linked form, that file is never uploaded to any server for processing. Nothing to leak, nothing to subpoena, nothing sitting in someone else's cloud. For law firms, chartered accountants, and government departments, that difference is not cosmetic — it is the whole point.

What you get: a searchable PDF

MayaPDF's OCR produces a searchable PDF: the original page image is kept exactly as it looked, and an invisible, correctly-positioned text layer is placed on top. The page looks identical, but now you (and Ctrl-F, and any PDF reader, and a document management system) can search it, select text, and copy it out. You can also just extract the recognised text if you only need the words.

How to OCR a PDF in an Indian language

  1. Open MayaPDF and go to the OCR tool.
  2. Load your scanned PDF or an image (including a phone photo, via "Scan to PDF").
  3. Pick the language (or languages) on the page.
  4. Run OCR — it processes locally, page by page.
  5. Download the searchable PDF, or copy the extracted text.

Unlimited, including on the free trial

Because OCR runs on your own device and costs us nothing to serve, we do not cap it. OCR is unlimited in MayaPDF — every language, any number of pages — during the 14-day free trial and on MayaPDF Pro. The trial needs no credit card. (During the trial, exported files carry a small "MayaPDF Trial" footer line; your original upload is always clean. See pricing.)

Why a browser-based Indian-language OCR is rare

Good OCR for Indic scripts — with their conjuncts, matras, and complex shaping — is hard, and most tools either send your file to a paid cloud API or ignore Indian languages entirely. MayaPDF bundles the language data and runs the recognition locally, so you get privacy and breadth in one place. It is a genuinely India-first capability, built by a team that has made software in India since 1999.

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