How to Convert Scanned PDF to Editable Text (OCR Guide)

You receive a PDF. It looks like a document — text, paragraphs, maybe some charts. But when you try to select the text to copy or edit... nothing happens. You can't select anything. It's just a flat image.

That's because it was scanned. The scanner photographed each page and saved the images as a PDF, rather than saving the actual text. These are called "image PDFs" or "flat PDFs."

The solution is OCR — Optical Character Recognition. It analyzes the images and figures out what text they represent. Here's how to do it for free.

What Is OCR, Really?

OCR software looks at each character in an image and tries to determine what letter, number, or symbol it is. Modern OCR is surprisingly good — it can recognize printed text with 99%+ accuracy for clean documents.

The output is either:

• A searchable PDF — the original images with an invisible text layer underneath. You can select and copy text, but it still looks like the original scan
• A plain text file — just the extracted text, no formatting
• A Word document — reconstructed with formatting preserved as much as possible

Method 1: Browser-Based OCR (Easiest)

The easiest method uses browser-based OCR tools that process everything locally. No uploads, no waiting, no privacy concerns.

PeacefulPDF's OCR tool runs in your browser and converts scanned PDFs to searchable documents. You upload your scan, it processes the images, and you get back a PDF where you can select and copy text.

This works for most scanned documents — printed text, scanned books, receipts, invoices. It's not perfect for handwriting (that's a whole other challenge), but for standard scanned documents, it gets the job done.

Method 2: Google Drive (Free, Surprisingly Good)

Google Drive has built-in OCR that works on uploaded PDFs:

1. Upload your scanned PDF to Google Drive
2. Right-click the file → Open with → Google Docs
3. Google extracts the text and opens it as a editable Google Doc
4. Download as PDF or Word from there

This is genuinely good OCR. Google uses advanced machine learning, and it shows. The accuracy is high, even for documents with some noise or imperfection.

The trade-off: you're uploading your documents to Google. For sensitive documents, this might not be ideal. But for general use, it's a powerful free option.

Method 3: Desktop OCR Software

If you do OCR regularly, desktop software might be worth it:

Tesseract (Free, Open Source)

Tesseract is the gold standard for free OCR. It's been developed for decades and produces solid results:

tesseract input.pdf output

It outputs a text file. For PDFs, it processes each page as an image. It's command-line only, but powerful.

Install on Mac: brew install tesseract
On Linux: sudo apt install tesseract-ocr
On Windows: Download the installer from GitHub

Windows: OneNote

Here's something weird: Microsoft OneNote has built-in OCR. You can:

1. Insert your PDF as printout (Insert → Print Out)
2. Right-click the image → Copy Text from Picture
3. Paste the text wherever you need it

It's not a full workflow, but if you already use OneNote, it's a handy trick.

Mac: Built-in Preview OCR

Mac users: you can copy text from PDFs in Preview, even scanned ones, if they're already searchable. But for truly scanned documents, you need to use a different approach.

What About Editing the Scanned Text?

OCR converts images to text, but editing that text is separate. Here's the workflow:

1. Run OCR to make the PDF searchable
2. Open in a PDF editor to make changes

PeacefulPDF's editor lets you add text, annotations, and signatures to PDFs. After OCR processing, you can edit your scanned document just like any other PDF.

For converting scanned PDFs to fully editable Word documents, the workflow is:

1. Run OCR → searchable PDF
2. Use PDF to Word converter to get editable text

It's a two-step process, but it gives you the best results.

Handwriting Recognition

I should mention: OCR works great on printed text. It works less great on handwriting. If you need to convert handwritten notes to text, you're in harder territory.

Tools like Google Keep and OneNote have handwriting recognition. Apple's Notes app on iPad/Mac with Apple Pencil is surprisingly good. But general-purpose OCR? Not there yet for handwriting.

If you have handwritten documents that need digitization, expect a manual process or specialized services.

Accuracy Tips

OCR quality depends heavily on the input. Here's how to get better results:

• Higher resolution scans — 300 DPI is standard; don't go below 200 DPI
• Clean documents — wrinkles, stains, and shadows confuse OCR
• Good contrast — black text on white paper works best
• Straight pages — skewed scans cause recognition errors

If your scans are giving you trouble, try cleaning them up first. A quick ImageMagick command or photo editor adjustment can dramatically improve OCR accuracy.

Common OCR Scenarios

Let me cover the most common use cases:

Books and Long Documents

OCR is perfect for digitizing books. You end up with a searchable PDF where you can find specific phrases, copy quotes, and read without the bulk of the physical book.

Invoices and Receipts

Businesses use OCR constantly for invoice processing. Extract line items, dates, totals. It automates data entry that would otherwise be manual.

Historical Documents

Archives use OCR to make old documents searchable. Old newspapers, letters, records. The tricky part is older fonts and possible paper degradation.

Forms

Fillable forms are different — they're designed for data entry. But scanned forms that someone filled out by hand? That's OCR territory, with all the handwriting challenges I mentioned.

The Bottom Line

Converting scanned PDFs to editable text is straightforward:

• For quick, private OCR: Use PeacefulPDF's OCR tool
• For best accuracy: Use Google Drive (with the privacy trade-off)
• For automation: Use Tesseract in your scripts

Stop struggling with non-selectable text. OCR your scans and treat those documents like normal files.