How to make a scanned PDF searchable
You open a PDF, press Ctrl+F, type a word you can see on the page, and get no results. You try to copy a sentence and select nothing, or the whole page at once. The file is a scan: each page is a photograph of text, not text. Text recognition (OCR) fixes that by reading the image and adding the words to the file.
Open OCR PDFRecognise text in scanned documents and make them searchable and selectable.
How to tell if a PDF is a scan
- Search finds nothing, even for words you can clearly see.
- Selecting text grabs the whole page as one block, or nothing at all.
- Zooming in makes the letters blurry or blocky, the way a photo does, instead of staying sharp.
- Converting it gives an empty document. PDF to Word and PDF to Excel on a scan stop with a message that the file has no selectable text.
Make it searchable step by step
- Open OCR PDF and add the scanned PDF. OCR is part of Papermint Premium, which handles up to 200 pages per document.
- Choose the document language. There are 15: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese and Korean.
- To recognise only part of a long file, enter a page range such as 1-10.
- Select OCR PDF and download the result. It looks exactly like the original: the recognised text is added as an invisible layer behind each page image, so you can now search, select and copy it.
Pages that already have real text are left as they are, so a file that mixes typed and scanned pages only has its scanned pages recognised. If every page already has text, the result tells you nothing needed recognising.
Getting accurate results
- Pick the right language. It matters more than any other setting, because it tells the recogniser which letters and words to expect.
- Turn on Enhance faint scans for faded photocopies, light pencil or grey backgrounds. It converts the page to greyscale and boosts the contrast before reading. Leave it off for clean scans.
- Start from a good scan. Straight, evenly lit pages read far better than skewed or shadowed ones. Our guide to scanning with your phone covers how.
- Expect printed text, not handwriting. Handwriting is generally not recognised.
What you can do next
Once the text is there, other tools can use it. Convert the searchable PDF with PDF to Word to edit it, pull tables out with PDF to Excel, or let Smart Redact find personal details to remove. Scans are usually large, and Compress PDF keeps the recognised text when it shrinks them.