How to make a scanned PDF searchable (and copy text from it)

You press Ctrl+F in a PDF and nothing is found, even though the word is right there on the page. You try to select a sentence to copy it, and the whole page gets selected like a picture. That's because, as far as your computer is concerned, it is a picture: a scan. Here's how to turn it into a PDF you can search and copy from.

Make PDF searchableAdd a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs.

Why scanned PDFs aren't searchable

A PDF exported from a word processor contains real text: characters, with their fonts and positions. A scanner or a phone camera doesn't produce text. It produces an image of the page, which is wrapped in a PDF.

To make it searchable, the text has to be recognised from the image. That's OCR, optical character recognition: software that looks at the shapes on the page and works out which letters and words they are.

What OCR PDF does

PDFVelora's OCR PDF reads each scanned page and adds an invisible text layer on top of the page image, with every word placed exactly over the word in the picture. The page looks exactly the same as before, but now you can:

• Search it with Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac), and so can search tools that index your documents.
• Select and copy text from it.
• Have it read aloud by screen readers.

You also get the recognised text as a separate plain-text file, handy if you just want to paste the words somewhere.

Pages that already contain real text are left as they are, so OCR on a mixed document only works on the pages that need it.

Step by step

1. Open OCR PDF and drop your scanned PDF on the page.
2. Choose the language of the document: English, French, Arabic or Spanish, or let it be detected automatically from the first pages.
3. Start OCR. It takes a few seconds per page, so long documents take a few minutes. Documents up to 200 pages are supported.
4. Download the searchable PDF and, if you need it, the text file.
5. Test it: open the PDF and search for a word you can see on a page.

Photos and single images

If what you have is a photo of a page, a screenshot or a scan saved as a picture (JPG, PNG, HEIC…), use Image to text. It reads the text from images (and from scanned PDFs) and gives you text you can copy, plus a searchable PDF.

Getting good results

OCR is only as good as the image it reads. A few things make a big difference:

• Resolution. Scan at 300 DPI for normal text. Very small print can benefit from more; much less than 300 DPI makes letters blurry.
• Straight, flat pages. Pages photographed at an angle, or books with curved pages near the spine, are harder to read.
• Contrast and light. Even lighting, no shadows from your hand or phone, dark text on a light background.
• The right language. Choose the document's language, or use automatic detection. Recognising French text with English settings, for example, will get accented letters wrong.
• Clean originals. Stamps, handwritten notes and highlighter over text can confuse recognition.

Signed documents

A PDF carrying a digital signature can't have a text layer added: changing the file would invalidate the signature, so OCR PDF won't process it. Keep the signed original as it is.

Want to edit the text, not just search it?

A searchable PDF still looks exactly like the scan, so you can't rewrite its paragraphs. If you need to edit the content, convert it to Word with PDF to Word, which runs OCR on scanned pages and rebuilds an editable document. Our guide How to convert PDF to Word without losing formatting has tips for getting a clean result.

Other things you can do once the text is there

• Ask questions about it with Chat with PDF, get a summary, or translate it with Translate PDF. These AI tools need a free account.
• Shrink it. Scans are often large; Compress PDF can make the file much smaller for email.