Make PDF Searchable with Postman

Step 1: Scanned PDF File

In our image below, we used our PDF Multitool desktop app to look up the word Character. Because our file is scanned and unsearchable, it couldn’t find a match in the document.

Step 2: Set up Postman

To get started, we recommend that you set up Postman for PDF.co using the Postman Collection. You can follow our step-by-step guide: How to Integrate Postman and PDF.co.

Once you are set, open the PDF.co API v.1.00 collection and click on POST /pdf/makesearchable under the PDF Make Text Searchable folder. This will open the PDF Make Text Searchable template with sample data that you can test right away to review the output.

Step 3: Configure PDF Make Searchable

You can replace the url parameter’s value with your file to try it out. If your file is not in English, you can set the language in the lang parameter. Some of our supported languages are spa (Spanish), deu (German), fra (French), and a lot more. If your document contains English and German words, you can use eng+deu as lang value.

To learn more about PDF Make Searchable API and its different parameters, please check out our API Documentation.

Click on the Send button to call the API and process the document.

Step 4: PDF.co Output URL

Great! We got a status 200 OK. Open the url to view and download the file. The output url is temporary and expires after an hour by default. You can increase the output link expiration when you are under the Business plan and higher.

Step 5: Searchable PDF Output

Using the PDF Multitool desktop app, you can see that the file is still a scanned PDF but has been converted to a searchable PDF and can now match the word Character.