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How to make a scanned PDF searchable

By the Fusion Office team · Updated

Quick answer

Open OCR PDF, choose the scanned PDF and press Make searchable. The tool recognises the text on each page and adds it as an invisible layer, so the PDF looks the same but you can search, select and copy the words.

How to tell if a PDF needs OCR

Open the PDF and try to select a word or search with Ctrl+F (⌘F on a Mac). If nothing is found, the pages are images of text, which is typical for scanners, phone scans and faxes. OCR (optical character recognition) reads those images and adds real text.

Run OCR step by step

  1. 1Open OCR PDF and choose the file.
  2. 2Leave “Skip pages that already have text” on for documents that mix typed and scanned pages.
  3. 3Press Make searchable. The first time, the recognition engine downloads to your browser; after that it starts straight away.
  4. 4Download the searchable PDF.

OCR runs on your device, so even sensitive scans stay private. Recognition currently supports English text.

Get better OCR results

  • Scan at 300 DPI if you can; blurry or tiny text is misread.
  • Keep pages straight and evenly lit. When photographing, hold the phone parallel to the page.
  • Printed text works far better than handwriting.
  • Crop away dark scanner edges with Crop PDF if they confuse recognition.

What you can do after OCR

Once a scan has text, every text tool works on it: convert it with PDF to Word or PDF to Excel, ask questions about it, redact names and numbers, or split it at a keyword.