PDFOCR

How to make a scanned PDF searchable (OCR in English and Indonesian)

Scanned documents are just pictures. OCR adds real text to every page so you can search, copy and quote it, without changing how the pages look.

· 5 min read

Scan a contract, a certificate or an old letter and you get a PDF that looks fine but behaves like a photo: Ctrl+F finds nothing, and you cannot copy a single word. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text in the images and adds it as an invisible layer under each page.

Run OCR in 3 steps

  1. Open OCR PDF and upload the scanned PDF (up to 50 pages, max 10 MB).
  2. Choose the language: English, Indonesian, or both for mixed documents.
  3. Click Process. The PDF you download looks the same, but now you can search it and copy text.
Make your scans searchable.OCR PDF

Get the best results

  • Scan at 300 dpi. Lower resolutions make small text hard to read, for people and for OCR.
  • Straight, well-lit pages work best. Slightly crooked or sideways pages are straightened automatically.
  • Pick the right language. Indonesian words are recognised far better with the Indonesian setting.
  • Pages that already have text are left as they are, so mixed documents are fine.

After OCR

Scans are often large: Compress PDF shrinks them for email. Need to edit the text? Convert the OCR result with PDF to Word.

Handwriting and very decorative fonts are not recognised reliably. Printed text works best.