How to make a scanned PDF searchable

You press Ctrl+F in a scanned contract and it finds nothing. You try to copy a paragraph and select the whole page as one block. That's because a scan isn't text at all: it's a photograph of a page saved inside a PDF.

Optical character recognition (OCR) reads the letters in that picture and adds them to the file as real text, so you can search, select and copy, without changing how the pages look.

Run OCR on your scan

1. Open OCR PDF and drop in the scanned PDF.
2. Choose the language it is written in. If it mixes languages, tick up to three.
3. Download the searchable PDF.

The recognised text is added as an invisible layer lined up under the words on each page. The pages themselves aren't changed, so the file looks exactly the same and barely grows.

Why it takes a little longer

Reading text from an image is real work, and here it all happens on your own computer rather than on a server. Expect a few seconds per page, depending on your device. The trade is worth it for documents like medical records or tax papers, which never leave your machine.

Getting the best results

• Clean, straight scans of printed text come out very accurately.
• Accuracy drops with faint, blurry, skewed or very small print. Rescanning at a higher resolution helps more than anything else.
• Handwriting is generally not recognized.

What OCR makes possible

Once a scan has text, everything else works on it too: copy all its words out with PDF to text, pull its tables into a spreadsheet with PDF to Excel, or compare two scanned versions word by word with Compare PDF.