OCR Explained: Make Scanned PDFs Searchable

You scan a five-page document. The PDF looks fine, but try to copy a sentence from it and… nothing. That's because a scanned PDF is just a stack of images. To make it searchable, you need OCR.

What OCR does

Optical Character Recognition analyzes the pixels of an image and recognises which shapes are letters, numbers and punctuation. The output is a layer of selectable, searchable text overlaid on top of the original image — so the file looks identical but suddenly behaves like a real document.

How to OCR a PDF

1. Open OCR PDF.
2. Upload your scanned PDF.
3. Pick the document language for higher accuracy.
4. Download the searchable PDF.

Tips for accurate OCR

• Resolution matters — 300 DPI is the sweet spot.
• Straighten skewed scans before OCR.
• Pick the right language — modern OCR supports 100+.
• Clean backgrounds — high-contrast black-on-white scans recognise best.

Once your PDF is searchable

• Convert to Word with formatting intact.
• Compress with Compress PDF — OCR'd files compress better.
• Search across files in your file manager or Spotlight.