Make PDF Searchable with Postman

In this tutorial, we will show you how to make your scanned PDF searchable using Postman and PDF.co. You can use any tools to check if a document is searchable.

Contents

01
Scanned PDF File
    02
    Set up Postman
      03
      Configure PDF Make Searchable
        04
        PDF.co Output URL
          05
          Searchable PDF Output

            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.

            Scanned PDF Source File
            Scanned PDF Source File

            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.

            PDF Make Text Searchable folder

            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.

            Configuring the API

            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.

            Our successful output URL

            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.

            Searchable PDF Output
            Searchable PDF Output

            In this tutorial, you learned how to make a scanned PDF into a searchable PDF using Postman and PDF.co. You also learned how to use the PDF Multitool desktop app to check if the document is scanned and searchable.