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Guide · PDF

How to make a scanned PDF searchable (OCR)

A photograph of a page is not a document until it has a text layer. ChargeBite runs Tesseract with deskew, keeps the original scan, and deletes the upload — useful when the page is an ID or a statement.

Updated 2026-09-08

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OCR PDF →

Searchable PDF vs plain text

Searchable PDF is the quality default: you still see the scan, but you can find words. Plain text is for pasting into notes. If PDF to Word produced pictures instead of paragraphs, OCR first.

Step-by-step

  1. Open OCR PDF.
  2. Drop a scanned PDF or a photo of a page.
  3. Pick searchable PDF or text, and the page language.
  4. Download, then continue in PDF to Word or PDF to Excel.

FAQ

Does OCR replace the page with text?

No. Searchable mode keeps the scan and adds a hidden text layer so you can search and copy.

Can I drop a phone photo?

Yes. JPEG, PNG, WebP, and HEIC are accepted as well as PDFs.