How to Make PDF Files Searchable
Portable Document Format documents may be scanned, created with an editing utility such as Adobe Acrobat, or may be “printed” from an application installed on a computer with an Adobe print driver. When PDF documents are created, they are in an image format and the text within the document is not searchable by default. However, by performing Optical Character Recognition on the PDF, the text in the document may be modified into searchable rendered text.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Click the “Start” button and select “Adobe Acrobat” from the Programs list.
-
2
Click “File” from the top navigation bar, and then select “Open” from the context menu.
-
-
3
Navigate to the non-searchable PDF file to be made searchable. Click on the PDF to open it in Adobe Acrobat.
-
4
Select the “Document” option from the top navigation bar.
-
5
Select the option "Recognize Text Using OCR" from the "Context" menu. A "Recognize Text" dialog box appears, allowing the user to enter the pages to be modified and the output type. Enter the pages to be converted. Select “All Pages” to convert the entire PDF.
-
6
Click "OK" to confirm these settings options and begin the conversion. During the conversion, Adobe Acrobat converts images of text characters into rendered text. If the OCR engine encounters ambiguous text, a dialog box will appear asking the user to type the correct character or phrase.
-
7
Type any ambiguous characters into the provided text boxes and click “OK.” Allow the OCR engine to proceed through the document until conversion is complete. A dialog box appears notifying the user that the document conversion is finished.
-
8
Click the “File” option from the top navigation bar, then “Save.” Choose a new name for the PDF to preserve the original document.
-
9
Test the PDF by opening in a PDF reader, such as the free Adobe Reader, and searching for a word or phrase. To search in Adobe Reader, type a word or phrase into the "Search" input box on the top navigation bar and click "Go." If the search is functional and the word or phrase is found in the document text, the conversion has been successful.
-
1
Tips & Warnings
If Adobe Acrobat displays a message stating that “OCR could not be performed because the page contains renderable text,” the text in the PDF is already searchable and does not require an OCR conversion.
