How to make a scanned PDF searchable
- Choose your scanned PDF, or drag it onto the box above.
- Select Make searchable. Long readings can take a minute or two.
- Open the downloaded file and press Ctrl+F (⌘F on Mac). The pages look the same, but now the text can be searched, highlighted and copied.
Questions
What is OCR?
OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters in a picture of a page and turns them into real text. Scanned course readings are usually just images, which is why you can't search or highlight them. OCR adds an invisible text layer without changing how the pages look.
What happens to my file?
OCR is too heavy to run in a browser, so the file goes to our server over an encrypted connection. It's processed and deleted as soon as your download starts. Nothing is stored or read.
How do I get the best results?
Straight, well-lit scans work best. Phone photos taken at an angle may miss words. Pages that already contain text are left alone, so mixed PDFs are fine.