How to convert a scanned PDF to an editable Word document
Why a scan converts to pictures
A PDF made by a word processor holds text: letters in fonts, at positions on the page. A PDF made by a scanner or a phone camera holds a picture of each page. It may look the same, but there is no text in it to select, search or convert, so a converter can only put the pictures into the Word file.
The way round is optical character recognition, OCR: reading the letters in the picture and adding them to the page as real text.
Convert a scan to Word in two steps
- Open the scan in OCR PDF and run recognition. The words on every page are found and added to the PDF as text, placed over the picture where they were. This runs in your browser, on your device, in about 50 languages.
- Convert it with PDF to Word. The recognised words become real Word paragraphs you can retype, restyle and reflow.
If all you need is the words, PDF to Text saves them as plain text or Markdown instead. If you only need to change a few words, there is no need to convert at all: after OCR, edit the text on the page itself.
Getting the best recognition
- Scan at 300 dots per inch for small print; 200 is enough for ordinary text.
- Keep the page flat and straight, and evenly lit if you photograph it. Shadows and curved pages are the commonest cause of misread words.
- Check numbers, names and symbols after converting. Recognition is very good at ordinary words and makes its mistakes on unusual characters; currency signs such as ₦ are a known weak spot.
Private by design
Scans are often the documents people most want to keep to themselves: IDs, contracts, medical letters. OnePDF's recognition models run in your browser, so the pages are never sent to a server to be read, signed in or not.