PDF format to digitize documents.
First, let’s talk about Why we create PDFs in the first place and why it is necessary to make them searchable.
In today’s technological world where everything is going online to be available for use to anyone, we need to digitize our documents too. The best way to digitize the documents is by converting them into TIFF, PDF, and JPEG. These are the common document formats that are used among them PDF is the most common and is recognized by most of the online software and databases.
So, when the documents are scanned you use them for any purpose, and then you need to find particular information. To do this you can make a PDF searchable.
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What is a Searchable PDF?
Making PDF searchable means that PDFs are normally the images of a web document. You can’t edit it; you can’t add anything to it if it’s not processed.
Benefits of a Searchable PDF
One of the benefits of a searchable PDF is you can look for the information very easily regardless of the length of the document.
For example, a document Is 100 pages long and you want to find a specific keyword. You can’t go reading all the 100 pages from the start, if so then what’s the use of digitizing the documents.
Instead what you can do is simply search the keyword by going into the menu or simple press command “Ctrl + F” (For Windows users) or “Command + F” (For Mac) and type in the keyword and it will move you to that keyword in the document.
Now let’s start the tutorial
The first step we will do is to open the given link:
https://app.pdf.co/make-pdf-searchable
When you open this link a window appears on your screen which looks like that:
The very next step we did is that first, we clicked on “choose file”. When you click on “choose file” a new small window is shown on your screen like:
When you select any PDF and open it will be opened on the pdf.co online tool dashboard as you can see below.
After selecting any document the next step is to click on the “Proceed”.
After click on “proceed,” it will take some time for processing the document we uploaded.
When the processing is complete the PDF file is transformed into a searchable document and it will look like this:
As you can see the link is available to download the transformed PDF file. Click on it and save it on your destination location.
Now the step we will do is to click on this link. When you click on the link the PDF file is opened.
Now let’s see if it works and we can actually search any word. You press “CTRL+F” to check the word. Suppose I want to check the word ”blockchain” in the PDF.
You will see clearly in the red highlighted box that the word “blockchain” is 23 times in the PDF and it’s also highlighted in the document itself.
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Convert Image PDF to Search PDF Online – FAQ
Why is My PDF Not Searchable
Your PDF may not be searchable if the source document that was converted to a PDF was an image. That is because while you see the text as distinct, the PDF reader sees it as part of the whole image, which you saved as a PDF.
If that is the case, you can make it searchable using our searchable PDF tool, by converting it to a text PDF. You can then search its text, as you would any other text PDF. Our tool works faster if the source image’s quality is 72dpi or more.
How Do I Enable OCR in PDF?
You can use our searchable PDF tool to enable OCR in PDF. The tool converts the image text, to actual text, using its inbuilt OCR technology. You don’t need to change anything in the PDF itself, the tool will do the OCR processing on its own.
Can You Make a Scanned PDF Searchable?
You can make a scanned PDF searchable, using our searchable PDF online tool. The tool uses Optical Character Recognition to identify the text in the PDF and then recreates a text PDF from that image PDF.
The rest of the image is maintained, in order not to distort the PDF’s formatting. In regard, your scanned PDF is converted into a search PDF.
How to Search Text in an Image PDF
You can search text in an image PDF, after you convert the image text, to plain text, using our search PDF tool’s inbuilt OCR. The tool will also save the converted image PDF for you so that you can search it offline after you save it.
You don’t need to pay for this particular service if you are using it for commercial reasons. We recommend that you only upload PDF files that are less than 5MB, to get faster results. You can use our PDF compression tool to do that.
How the Searchable PDF tool Works
The searchable PDF tool works in three steps. First, it extracts the text from a PDF image. Next, it reconstructs the PDF, by including the extracted text. Finally, it saves the PDF as a searchable PDF, which you can search online or offline.
Scanned PDF Image to Searchable PDF
Overall, you can convert scanned PDF to searchable PDF online free using our tool, if the PDF is for personal use. However, if you need to convert image PDF to searchable PDF in bulk, then you need to buy credits, and use our PDF image to searchable PDF tool, which is designed for commercial use.
Now the tutorial is complete. I hope this was helpful.
Check this nice video below showing how to make a PDF searchable:
