How to turn a scanned PDF into editable text

Why a scan isn't editable

When a paper document is scanned or photographed, each page is saved as a picture. You can read it, but your computer only sees pixels: search finds nothing, you can't select a sentence, and converters that read text have nothing to work with. OCR (optical character recognition) looks at the picture and works out which words are on it.

Step by step

1. 1Open PDF OCR and choose one scanned PDF, up to 25 MB. Recognition runs in your browser, so the PDF and its text are not uploaded.
2. 2Pick the pages you need. The free plan recognises up to 5 pages per document; for a longer scan, take out the important pages first with Split PDF.
3. 3Start OCR and wait while each page is recognised. The recognition engine downloads once, then your browser keeps it.
4. 4Download the searchable PDF, the plain-text .txt file, or both.

Getting the text into Word

The quickest route is to open the .txt file and paste the text where you need it. If you want a .docx, run the searchable PDF through PDF to Word, which reads its new text layer. Either way you get the words, not the original layout.

How accurate is it?

Clean, straight scans of printed English text are usually recognised well. Faint, skewed, handwritten or low-resolution pages will contain mistakes, so read the result before relying on it — especially names, numbers and amounts. Only English is supported at the moment.

Getting a scan that OCR can read

The quality of the scan matters more than anything else. If you can rescan the paper, lay it flat, use even light without shadows across the page, and keep the camera or scanner straight above it. A resolution of about 300 DPI is a good balance; very low-resolution phone photos lose the fine shapes that tell letters apart.

Crooked pages, folds, coffee stains and stamps over the text all reduce accuracy. Pages printed in a very small or decorative font are harder too. It is worth testing one or two pages first, checking the text, and only then recognising the whole document.

When you don't need OCR

Not every PDF that looks like a scan is one. Try selecting a word in your PDF reader: if the text highlights, the PDF already has a text layer and you can go straight to PDF to Word or copy the text directly. PDF OCR detects pages that already contain text and leaves them unchanged, so mixed documents are safe to run through it as well.

If you only need to share or read the document, rather than edit it, the scan may be fine as it is. OCR is most useful when you need to search a long document, quote from it, or reuse its words somewhere else.

Frequently asked questions