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How to make a scanned PDF searchable with OCR

Published October 28, 2026 by Jason Nel

You scan a contract, search it for a name, and get “no matches”, even though the name is right there on page 3. That’s because a scanned page is a photograph. You can read it, but your computer only sees pixels. OCR, short for optical character recognition, reads the words in the picture and adds them back as text.

How to tell if a PDF needs OCR

Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for a word you can see on the page, or try to select a line of text with the mouse. If search finds nothing and the mouse selects the whole page as an image, the PDF needs OCR.

How to make a scanned PDF searchable step by step

  1. Open OCR PDF and choose the scanned PDF.
  2. Choose the document language. Pick every language the document uses if it’s mixed. English, Afrikaans, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch are available.
  3. Leave Skip pages that already have text ticked, so pages that are already searchable aren’t processed again.
  4. Tick Also save the text as a .txt file if you want the plain text as well.
  5. Click Make searchable. The first time, your browser downloads the OCR engine and language data; after that it starts faster. Your document is never uploaded.

What you get

The same PDF, looking exactly the same, with an invisible text layer placed over the printed words. You can now search it, select and copy text, and let your computer or document system index it. This is the same approach scanners and Adobe Acrobat use.

How to get better results

  • Scan at 300 dpi. Lower resolutions blur small letters; higher ones make files bigger without helping much.
  • Black and white or grayscale is usually clearer for OCR than color.
  • Keep pages straight and the right way up. Turn sideways pages with Rotate PDF first.
  • Check names and numbers. Clean printed text is usually read very accurately, but handwriting, faint copies, tiny print and decorative fonts are harder. Check anything important in the text you copy.

What to do next