Media and publishing
Make an archive scan searchable.
A scanned page is a photograph of words. Nothing can search it, quote it or check it against anything until the words are text.
- You start with
- Scanned PDF
- You end up with
- Searchable PDF
How it goes
2 steps
Each one is a tool you can open on its own. The order is the part worth keeping.
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Make a scan searchable
Run the scan through. The page still looks like the scan; the difference is that the text is now selectable.
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PDF to text
Take the text out on its own when you need to quote from it or run it past a fact-check.
What you will need
The tools this uses
Answers
Questions people ask
How good is it on an old page?
Recognition follows the scan. A clean, straight, high-resolution scan reads well; a photograph of a page taken at an angle reads badly, and rescanning beats correcting.
Does the layout survive?
The page image is untouched, so what you see does not move. Columns and captions are where extracted text is most likely to arrive out of order.
Where does the document go?
Nowhere — the recognition runs in this tab.
Media and publishing
Also on this desk
Make an archive scan searchable
No account needed, no watermark, and nothing to install.