How to OCR a Scanned PDF (Make It Searchable)

A scanned PDF is really just a picture of a page. You cannot select the text, search it, or copy a quote, because to the computer it is pixels, not letters. OCR (optical character recognition) is the technology that reads those pixels and turns them back into real text.

OCR quality depends on the scan: clean, high-contrast, upright pages recognize far better than blurry or skewed ones. Straightening pages and increasing contrast before you start noticeably improves the result.

To OCR a PDF with PdfWill: open the OCR tool and upload your scanned file. The recognition engine runs in your browser and extracts the text, which you can then copy or save. Nothing is uploaded to a server.

Once you have the text, converting the document with the PDF to Word tool gives you a fully editable file. If a page is sideways, rotate it first so OCR reads it correctly.