Make a scanned PDF searchable
Turn a picture of a page into text you can search and select.
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Select a scanned PDF
or drag and drop here
Accepted formats: PDF
Processing…
Quick facts
- What it does
- Recognises the text in a scanned page and adds it as an invisible layer behind the image, leaving the page looking exactly as it did.
- Input
- Output
- Processing
- On our server
- Files uploaded?
- Yes, temporarily
- Account required?
- No
- Best for
- Making an archive of scanned documents findable, or preparing a scan for a tool that needs real text — PDF to Word, PDF to Excel, extract text.
- Main limitation
- Recognition is a reading of the image, not a transcript. Clean printed text at 300 DPI is highly accurate; handwriting, faint fax output, skewed pages and unusual fonts are much less so. Pages that already contain text are left alone rather than re-recognised.
How to use this tool
- Choose the scanned PDF.
- Pick the language of the text on the page. The right language matters more than anything else you can set.
- Press Apply. The file is sent for recognition over an encrypted connection.
- Download the searchable PDF. It looks identical and now answers a text search.
Why use iBuildPDF
A scan is a photograph of a document. It looks like text and contains none, which is why searching it finds nothing and copying from it copies nothing. OCR reads the picture and writes what it sees into a text layer positioned behind the image — so the page still looks exactly like the scan, and every tool that needs real text suddenly works on it. This is the step that turns a folder of unusable scans into a searchable archive.
How it works
Each page is examined; pages that already carry a text layer are skipped, so a mixed document is not degraded by re-recognising the parts that were already fine. The rest are recognised in the language you chose and the result is written behind the original image, which is left untouched.
Frequently asked questions
Which languages can it recognise?
The languages installed on our processing server, which the picker on this page lists — currently Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), German, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. Only languages actually installed are offered, so anything in that list will work.
Does the page look different afterwards?
No. The original image is kept exactly as it was and the recognised text is placed behind it, invisible. What changes is that the file can now be searched and copied from.
How accurate is it?
It depends almost entirely on the scan. Straight, clean, printed text at around 300 DPI recognises very well. A crooked page, a photograph taken at an angle, a faded fax or a handwritten note will produce mistakes. Proofread anything where a wrong digit would matter.
What if my document is only partly scanned?
That is handled. Pages that already contain text are left alone and only the scanned pages are recognised, so a report with scanned exhibits attached comes back with the exhibits searchable and the rest untouched.
I picked the wrong language and the result is nonsense.
Run it again with the right one. Recognition matches shapes against a language model, so a French page read as English produces confident-looking rubbish. The original scan is unchanged, so there is nothing to undo.
Read more about this
Continue with your PDF
Your file is ready. These are the things people usually do next.