How to Crop Irregular White Space Around Scanned Document Content
A scanned document rarely fills the page perfectly. The scanner glass captured more area than the document occupied.
How to Redact Handwritten Notes From a Scanned PDF
A scanned document contains handwritten notes in the margins. Comments added during a meeting, questions scribbled next to paragraphs, arrows...
How to Merge Scanned and Digital PDFs Into a Consistent Document
A project file contains a digitally authored report with crisp vector text, and a scanned appendix with page images of handwritten notes.
How to OCR a Poor Quality Scan for the Best Possible Result
A poor quality scan is a photograph of a document taken in bad light, a fax that was printed and rescanned three times, a wrinkled page from an old...
How to Compare a Scanned Original With Its OCR Output for Accuracy
OCR converts scanned page images into machine-readable text. The output looks correct when you glance at it. Words are spelled correctly.
How to OCR a PDF That Contains Multiple Languages
A multilingual PDF contains pages in English, French, and German. A product manual with instructions in three languages on alternating pages.
Can You Translate a Scanned PDF Accurately Without Retyping
Yes, you can translate a scanned PDF accurately without retyping it, but the accuracy depends on the quality of two sequential processes: OCR, which...
How to Convert PDF Screenshots Into an Actual Text Document
Someone sends you a PDF that turns out to be a collection of screenshots. Each page is an image of text rather than actual text.
How to Convert Scanned Handwriting Into Editable Text
OCR technology has advanced to the point where printed text recognition is a solved problem.
How to Convert a Scan Into a Fully Searchable PDF
A scanned PDF is a collection of page images. It looks like a document, but to a computer it is a photo album.
How to Handle PDFs With a Mix of Scanned and Text Pages
A PDF assembled from multiple sources often contains a mix of scanned image pages and digitally created text pages.
How to Optimize a Scanned PDF for Fast Web Viewing
A scanned PDF fresh from a scanner or a phone camera is often too large for practical web use.
How to Make a Scanned PDF Look Like a Digital Original
A raw scanned PDF announces its origins immediately. The page images carry the slightly uneven contrast of a scanner lamp moving across paper.
Why Is My PDF Not Searchable?
A PDF where Ctrl+F finds nothing, where you can't select or copy text, and where clicking on text draws a rectangular box rather than highlighting...
How to Make a PDF Searchable
A searchable PDF is one where the text is stored as actual characters in the file rather than as an image.
Can You OCR a PDF in Google Drive?
Google Drive includes built-in OCR that runs automatically when you open a scanned PDF with Google Docs.
Why Does My PDF Have a Gray Background?
A gray background on a PDF page is usually one of three things: it was designed that way intentionally, it's a viewer display setting, or it came...
Can You Edit a Scanned PDF?
Editing a scanned PDF is more involved than editing a regular PDF, but it's not impossible.
Why Is My PDF File So Large After Scanning?
A scanned PDF that's 80MB for five pages of text is a common frustration. Scanning creates image files, not text files, and images — especially...
Why Can't I Search for Text Inside My PDF?
Pressing Ctrl+F in a PDF and finding nothing — or finding the search bar works but returns zero results even for words you can clearly see on the...
