Recognise text in a scanned PDF
Use OCR in PDF Editor to make scanned pages searchable and copyable, and to find and redact their text.
Recognising text reads the words on scanned pages with optical character recognition (OCR) and adds them to a copy of the PDF as invisible text over the words on the page. The pages look the same, and the text can be searched, selected and copied.
Recognise text in a PDF
Use Recognise text (OCR) among the quick tools on PDF Editor: choose the PDF, the pages (Pages without selectable text or All pages) and the languages on the pages, and the tool makes a new PDF.
In the editor, choose More, then Recognise text. Choose the pages (those without selectable text, the current page, the selected pages or all pages) and the languages on them. The recognised words are added when you export, and Find and Find and redact can use them straight away.
Languages and speed
Recognition runs in your browser; the pages are not uploaded. The first time a language is used, its data (about 1 to 3 MB) is downloaded from Magpie and kept in the browser. Each page takes several seconds.
The languages are English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, Korean, Arabic and Hindi. Choose every language that appears on the pages.
Recognition can misread words, especially in faint, small or handwritten text. Straighten in the editor levels tilted scans, but it turns a page into an image of itself, so recognise text after straightening, not before.
For help with recognising text, Contact support.
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