You know the invoice number is somewhere in that scanned PDF, but Ctrl+F finds nothing and you can’t select a single word. That’s because a scan is a picture of a page: there is no text in it to search.
Making it searchable means reading the page (OCR, optical character recognition) and putting what was read into the PDF as text.
How it works
The recognized text goes in as an invisible layer under the scan, the way Acrobat’s “Recognize text” does it. The page looks exactly the same: same pixels, same stamps, same signatures. But underneath, every word now sits where it appears on the scan, so:
- Search finds it, in any PDF viewer.
- Selecting a line highlights it and copy gives you the text.
- Your computer’s file search can find the document by its content.
Step by step
- Open the scanned PDF in Make a scanned PDF searchable.
- Its pages are read right away, in your browser. A page takes a few seconds; nothing is uploaded.
- Try it: press Ctrl+F (⌘F on a Mac) and search for a word on the page.
- Download the PDF. The text layer is saved in the file.
Getting good results
- Resolution matters. 200–300 dpi scans read best; low-resolution faxes and photos read worse.
- Straight pages. A slight tilt is corrected automatically; pages photographed at an angle are not.
- Tables are read cell by cell, so numbers next to table borders aren’t lost.
- Stamps and coloured signatures are ignored while reading, so the text under them is still found.
- Languages: English, German, Norwegian, Swedish and Ukrainian. The English pages read English and Ukrainian; for the others, switch the site’s language at the top. Handwriting isn’t recognized.
Why do it in the browser?
Scanned documents are often the sensitive ones: signed contracts, invoices with bank details, IDs. Here they are read on your own device, and the file is never sent anywhere.
And once a page has been read, you can also change its text: pick Edit text and click a line.