Today, we will show you a great tip to make any scanned PDF editable and searchable like normal files. And PDFelement from Wondershare is our tool-of-choice for this tutorial. For those who are new with this program, you can check out our detailed review for PDFelement at this link.
~> Read more: How to create advanced fillable PDF forms
Different from other PDF processing tools, PDFelement possesses an advanced OCR plugin that can easily recognize and edit text in any scanned and image PDFs. In addition to that, it professionally supports documents in 23 different languages, including English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, etc.
Before we get started, you’re required to have PDFelement installed on your computer. If you haven’t, get you own version in our below links:
PDFElement 6 STANDARD for Windows & Mac costs $59.95, but you can get the fully-featured program with PDFelement discount at only $41.97
Higher edition, PDFElement 6 PRO: Listed price $99.95 discount to only $69.97
In this article:
Step 1: Import your scanned PDF
Run the program by double-clicking on its icon on your desktop.
Click on Open file to browse for the form you’ve downloaded from above link.
Instruction for MAC OS:
Click Open File at the bottom right >> browse for the file >> Open.
Step 2: Perform OCR on your scanned PDF
After opening your file, there will be a yellow highlighted notification which says that “We detect this is a scanned PDF, and recommend you to perform OCR …” >> click Perform OCR .
When Optical Character Recognition window pops up, click Change Languages if you wish to use other language than the current one >> click OK and wait a few seconds for OCR to perform.
Step 3: Edit your file after performing OCR
When the process is complete, there will be a copy of your scanned file appearing under the name filename_OCR (1). Click Edit Text (2) and all the texts are now shown as editable fields for you (3).
When you’re done editing the file, save it by clicking on Save button at the top-left corner or using the keyboard combination Ctrl+S.
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