How to make a scanned PDF editable

How to tell if your PDF is a scan

• Try to select a word. If your cursor draws a box over the whole page instead of highlighting text, the page is an image.
• Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for a word you can see. If it is not found, there is no text layer.
• Look closely: specks, a slight tilt, shadows at the edge, or a page that looks photographed are giveaways.

Some PDFs are mixed: typed pages with a few scanned ones, such as a signed page added at the end. Check the page you actually need to change.

OCR a scanned PDF and edit it in your browser

peadf's edit scanned PDF tool has OCR built in. It runs in your browser on your own device, so the scan, which is often an ID, a letter or a signed form, is never uploaded.

1. 1

   Open the scan in the editor

   Drop in the PDF. When a page has no real text, the editor tells you and offers OCR.

2. 2

   Choose the language and press Run OCR

   Pick the language the document is written in. The first run loads the OCR engine once; after that each page takes a few seconds.

3. 3

   Click a recognised line and retype it

   Each line OCR found now edits like normal text. Lines it was unsure about are flagged for you to check.

4. 4

   Match the cover to the paper

   The cover behind an edited OCR line is white. If the scan is grey or cream, change Cover color in the side panel so the edit blends in.

5. 5

   Export

   Editing is free. Downloading the edited PDF needs a free account and starts at 99p for your first week.

Getting a clean result from OCR

• Scan at a decent resolution: 300 dpi is a good target. Blurry phone photos give OCR less to work with.
• Straighten and crop first. A page that is badly skewed or sideways reads worse; rotate the PDF or crop it if it needs it.
• Proofread the whole line you edit, not just the word you changed. OCR confuses similar shapes such as 0 and O, 1 and l, or rn and m.
• Edited OCR lines use a standard font, not the typeface in the scan, because a scan carries no font. Short corrections blend in best.
• Handwriting, stamps and very small print are often not recognised. For those, cover the area and use Add Text, as in our guide to whiting out a PDF.

Other ways to OCR a PDF

Microsoft Word and Google Docs can both convert a scanned PDF into a text document, which is handy if you want the words rather than the page: open the PDF in Word, or in Google Drive choose Open with > Google Docs. The layout is not kept, so you end up with a document that reads the same but looks different. If you need the page to look like the original with a few changes, editing the PDF directly is the better route.

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