Guide ·
How to make a scanned PDF searchable
If search can't find a word you can see on the page, or you can't select the text, the PDF is a scan: each page is a picture. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the words in those pictures and adds them as an invisible layer, so the page looks the same but works like normal text. It reads English.
Step by step
- 01
Open OCR and add the scan
Drop a scanned PDF, or photos of pages (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF or WebP). Several photos become one PDF, a page each, in the order you set.
- 02
Recognise the text
Select Recognise text. Every page without text of its own is read at up to 300 DPI.
- 03
Download the searchable PDF
The copy looks exactly like the scan, but you can search it, select text and copy it.
Which pages are read
Only pages with no text of their own. Pages that already have text, including an earlier OCR layer, are left as they are, so running OCR twice doesn't double the text. Up to 300 pages are read in one file.
Getting good results
- Turn sideways or upside-down pages first with Rotate PDF. OCR doesn't straighten pages.
- Scan at 300 DPI if you can, with the page flat and evenly lit.
- Clear printed text reads best. Handwriting, very small print and faint copies are often missed.
- Only English is recognised. Other languages and scripts won't be read reliably.
- A PDF that needs a password to open can't be read. Remove the password with Unlock PDF first.
Need text you can edit?
OCR keeps the scan as it is and makes it searchable. To edit the words, convert the scan with PDF to Word, which reads scanned pages too, or turn photos of pages into Word, Excel or text with Image to Word & more.
Questions
- Will the page look different?
- No. The recognised words are placed invisibly over the picture, so the page looks exactly as before.
- Which languages can it read?
- English, for now.
- What if every page already has text?
- Then there's nothing to recognise and you'll see a message saying so. The PDF is already searchable.