Make scanned PDF searchable

How to use the OCR PDF

1. Add your scanned commercial agreements, lease files, or invoice PDFs by dropping them into the processing window.
2. Choose your document language from the eight available options covering Western European alphabets.
3. Ensure the option to bypass pages containing existing text is checked, or specify target page numbers under advanced options.
4. Press OCR PDF to generate searchable document files, which download with the -ocr.pdf name suffix.

Making legacy commercial contracts and lease agreements searchable

Law offices, property managers, and procurement departments regularly handle historical contracts and signed paper agreements digitised by flatbed scanners. Because traditional scanners only capture flat graphic snapshots, staff cannot search for indemnification clauses, termination dates, or vendor names using standard shortcut keys. This tool examines each page at 300 dpi using pdf.js and applies Tesseract 5 to position an invisible text layer precisely beneath the original scan graphics.

Crucially, the underlying page imagery is preserved without recompression or visual degradation, maintaining the authenticity of company letterheads, ink signatures, and notary stamps. The resulting PDF file size increases only by the compact text coordinate layer. Once processed, staff can locate terms using Ctrl+F, highlight sentences to copy into contract briefs, and permit office document management systems to index files for discovery.

Western European typography limits and hybrid scan detection

The invisible text layer is rendered using standard Helvetica typography, which supports Western European Latin alphabets. Supported options cover English alongside Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Indonesian. Because Helvetica lacks character definitions for complex diacritics, Eastern European or specialized alphabets like Polish, Turkish, and Vietnamese are not supported for PDF text layering.

Office records frequently contain a mixture of digital cover sheets, computer-generated summary pages, and scanned signature appendices. The setting Skip pages that already have text is activated by default, ensuring the engine detects and skips pages that already possess digital text streams. This smart filtering saves processing time and preserves original vector text clarity, applying OCR exclusively to flat graphic pages.

Workstation compliance, password protection, and processing times

Scanned business filings, employee agreements, and tax documents involve sensitive commercial information that must comply with strict confidentiality policies. Because this tool runs through WebAssembly directly within your browser tab, commercial files are never transmitted to third-party cloud servers. Depending on page dimensions and processor speed, optical recognition requires several seconds per page to render and analyse each sheet.

Please note that password-protected PDF files cannot be processed until their security restrictions are removed using Unlock PDF. Output documents retain their standard PDF structure with the -ocr.pdf suffix rather than converting into editable Word files. Once finished, you can compress or merge your searchable records using the Continue with workflow options.

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