How to make a scanned PDF searchable with OCR
Published
You scan a contract, open the PDF, press Ctrl+F to find a name, and nothing happens. A scan is a photograph of the page. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the words in that picture and adds them to the file as real text.
Step by step
- Open OCR PDF and add the scanned file.
- Choose the language of the document, so letters such as é, ñ or ß are read correctly.
- Choose the result: a searchable PDF that looks exactly the same, or a plain text file.
- Press Make searchable and wait while each page is read. Expect a few seconds per page.
- Open the result and try searching for a word to check it worked.
Getting the best results
Clear, straight scans read best. Scan at 300 dpi if you can, in good light if you use a phone, and keep the page flat. Handwriting, very small print and photos of text at an angle are harder to recognise, so check important numbers by eye.
Why it is slower than other tools
Reading text from pictures is heavy work, and here it happens on your own device instead of a server. That is what keeps confidential scans private. The first run also downloads the language data once; after that it is faster.
What to do next
Once the PDF has text, you can convert it to an editable document with PDF to Word, or shrink the file for email with Compress PDF.