How to Convert Scanned PDFs into Editable Text

Why Scanned PDFs Are Hard to Edit

When a document is scanned, each page is saved as an image inside a PDF file. To your computer, it looks like a picture, not text. You cannot search within it or copy/paste sentences.

To make it editable, you need to run OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Step 1 – Check If Your PDF Is Scanned

• Try selecting text with your mouse. If you can't highlight individual words, it is likely a scan.
• Zoom in: if the text becomes blurry and pixelated, it's an image.

Step 2 – Convert Scanned PDF to Images (Optional)

Some OCR tools work better with image files. You can convert each page using a tool like PDF to JPG.

Step 3 – Run OCR on Each Page

1. Go to an Image to Text (OCR) tool.
2. Upload the page image or the entire scanned PDF if supported.
3. Select the correct language.
4. Click Extract Text and wait for the result.
5. Copy the text into a Word document or a text editor.

Step 4 – Clean Up the Text

OCR is not perfect, especially with poor-quality scans. Check for:

• Misread characters (O vs 0, l vs 1)
• Broken line breaks
• Missing punctuation

You can use an AI writing assistant to quickly fix grammar and formatting.

Benefits of Converting Scans to Text

• Make documents searchable
• Copy and reuse text in new documents
• Translate content into other languages
• Analyze large volumes of data programmatically