badloHow to Make a Scanned PDF Searchable
Updated
You press search in a scanned PDF and find nothing, because the page is just a picture. OCR, or optical character recognition, reads the words and adds them to the file.
Check whether you need OCR
Try selecting a sentence. If you can highlight single words, the PDF already has text and you don't need this. If the whole page gets selected, or nothing does, it's a scan. Our guide to scanned and digital PDFs has more detail.
Prepare your file
- Turn any sideways pages with Rotate PDF, as text needs to be the right way up.
- Remove pages you don't need with Remove PDF Pages.
- Split anything over 50 pages with Split PDF.
- If you can rescan, use 200 to 300 DPI and keep the page straight.
Run the OCR
Upload the file to OCR PDF and press the button. It can take a while, as each page is read separately. You'll get a new PDF that looks the same as before, with hidden text behind each page.
What to expect
Always check important names and figures. A 0 can be read as an O, and a 1 as an l.
| Your document | Likely result |
|---|---|
| Clean printed English | Good |
| Faded, crooked or blurry pages | Mistakes are likely |
| Handwriting | Usually poor |
| Urdu, Arabic or Hindi | Not supported at the moment |
