Nowadays, almost everything has become digital: our photos, music, videos. This makes a lot of sense because digital content can be easily managed, edited, and shared. But what about text documents? Thanks to advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technologies, it is now easier than ever to digitize printed or even handwritten text. You can scan your document and make it editable and searchable.
This article will help you answer the following questions: how to make a PDF searchable online and how to optimize your day-to-day work?
Why should you make PDFs searchable? Why use OCR?
Why not just take a picture, right? Because if you do, you will not be able to search for text or edit it, since it would only be an image. Scanning a document and using the OCR function can turn your file into a PDF you can search easily. Simply put, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) includes computer software that converts an image of a printed document back into an editable and searchable text file.
By making a scan searchable, an additional text layer is added to the scanned image, creating a so-called hybrid PDF. This text layer allows you to search for names, keywords, numbers, or subjects inside the PDF. No matter how basic or advanced your text extraction needs are, our OCR feature will help you quickly and efficiently turn your scanned documents into searchable ones.
How to make PDF text searchable?
PDF2Go offers you the simplest way to convert a scanned document into a searchable PDF. The service is available without installation, for free, on any OS and platform.
Follow these three easy steps:
- Upload your scanned PDF here.
- Choose the language of your PDF from the drop-down menu for better results. (optional)
- Click on "Start", and your searchable PDF will be ready to download.
As promised, in just a few easy steps, you can now convert images and other scanned documents into fully searchable PDF files. The only thing you have to do to create a PDF file and effortlessly search its content is to access our free web service, upload the scanned document, select the source document language(s), and the integrated OCR feature will do the rest.
Conclusion
Digitization of printed content is very useful because it makes storing, editing, and sharing text documents very easy. Your scanned document (saved as a PDF or image file) may contain text content that can be used or shared daily in different workflows.
Therefore, the main advantage of turning your scanned PDF (e.g. an invoice, receipt, contract) into a searchable PDF is the ability to search for specific numbers, phrases, and keywords in the scan by simply using the search function of your PDF reader. This way you can instantly find important information in your PDF documents.
Is this service free?
At PDF2Go, we're proud to offer our conversion and editing services online, for free. for free! However, free usage comes with some limitations, such as file size and the number of documents you can convert at once.
To help you get started, we provide a free package with daily Credits, so you can explore and test most features.
If you need more flexibility, consider our Premium Plan!
With over 20 advanced tools, including AI-powered features like OCR, you can handle any PDF-related task with ease.
Whether working from the office, at home, or on the go, a Premium subscription will boost your productivity and streamline your workflow.
For a full comparison of Free vs. Premium features, visit our Pricing page today!
