Make scanned PDFs searchable, right on your phone

How to make a PDF searchable with Doc Scanner

1. Scan or import the pages

   Tap the camera button and scan in Document or Batch mode. Already have a file? Open the Tools tab and tap Import PDF, or Photos to turn pictures into pages.

2. Tidy the pages

   Crop with the corner handles, rotate, and pick a filter such as Magic Color, Grayscale or B&W. Sharp, straight, high-contrast pages are the easiest to recognise.

3. Tap Share and choose PDF

   Open the document, tap Share, select PDF, then set the quality (Low, Medium or High), the page size (Original, A4 or Letter) and, if you like, only the pages you need with Select pages.

4. Send or save the file

   Send the PDF through your phone's share sheet, to e-mail, a messenger, your files app or a cloud drive app. Doc Scanner adds the invisible text layer while it builds the file.

5. Test it

   Open the PDF in any reader, such as Files on iPhone, a PDF viewer on Android, Preview or Adobe Acrobat Reader, and search for a word that appears on the page.

What a searchable PDF is

A scan is a picture of a page. Open an ordinary scanned PDF and search for a name or a number, and nothing comes up: to the computer it's just pixels. A searchable PDF has the same picture plus an invisible layer of text placed exactly over the words on the page. It looks identical, but now search finds the words, and you can jump straight to the page where they appear.

That matters the day you need one line out of a long contract, last year's insurance letter or a stack of receipts. For a deeper explanation, read what a searchable PDF is.

Make a scan searchable in 3 steps

There is no OCR button to find and no setting to switch on. In Doc Scanner, searchable is the default:

1. Scan the pages with the camera. Edge detection finds the corners, straightens the perspective and captures each page for you.
2. Tap Share and choose PDF.
3. Send it. The text layer is already inside.

It works for one page or a thick bundle: scan multiple pages into one PDF and the whole document comes out searchable. Photos from your gallery work too, see JPG to PDF.

Make an existing scanned PDF searchable

Got an old image-only PDF from a scanner at work, a bank or a school portal? Bring it into Doc Scanner and export it again:

• iPhone: open the Tools tab and tap Import PDF, or use Open in from another app.
• Android: tap Import PDF, or use Share to or Open with and pick Doc Scanner.

Each page of the imported PDF becomes a page image in the app. When you tap Share and choose PDF, Doc Scanner recognises the text on every page and builds a new PDF with a fresh text layer. Keep the original file as well: the exported copy is rebuilt from the page images, so any text the original already had is replaced by the newly recognised layer.

Online OCR tools usually work by uploading your file to their server. Doc Scanner does the recognition on the phone, so contracts, payslips and medical letters stay on your device. That also means it works with no internet connection; see our offline scanner app page.

Search your scans by the words inside

Once your PDFs are searchable, the find feature in any PDF reader takes you to the right line. Inside Doc Scanner, the search bar in your library finds documents by title, and by the words inside once a document's text has been recognised in the app. On iPhone, your documents also appear in Spotlight search by title and recognised text, so you can find a scan from the home screen.

Add folders, rename documents and merge related scans, and your paperwork stays easy to find.

Which languages are recognised

The text layer is built for Latin-alphabet languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, Swedish and Danish.

Documents in other scripts, such as Arabic, Chinese or Russian, still scan and export as clean PDFs, but their text is not recognised, so those PDFs can't be searched by word.

Searchable PDF vs copying text (Premium)

A searchable PDF is for finding things. Text extraction is for reusing them. On the free plan you get the first: every PDF you export can be searched. With Premium you also see the recognised text in the app, copy it with Copy text, save it with Share as TXT, or convert a document to a Word (.docx) or TXT file from Tools. If you need the words out of a photo, see image to text.

Your phone has built-in scanners too, such as the one in the iPhone Notes and Files apps or the Google Drive scanner on Android. They're handy for a quick capture. Doc Scanner gives you more control over the result: quality and page-size options, page selection, and six filters for one page or all pages.

See Doc Scanner in action

Scan your first document in seconds

Doc Scanner is free to download for iPhone and Android. No ads, no watermarks, no sign-up required.

Scan with your phone camera to get the app

Doc Scanner is not affiliated with Adobe, Apple and Google. Trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Related pages

• Image to textImage to text app for iPhone and Android: Doc Scanner reads text in photos and scans on your phone, offline. Copy it or save TXT or Word (Premium).
• Offline scannerDoc Scanner is an offline scanner app for iPhone and Android: scan, make searchable PDFs and recognize text on your phone, with no internet needed.
• Many pages, one PDFScan multiple pages into one PDF on iPhone or Android: Batch mode captures page after page, then reorder, add or merge. No watermarks, no ads, no sign-up.
• JPG to PDFConvert JPG to PDF on iPhone or Android: combine several photos into one PDF, reorder pages, pick A4 or Letter. No watermark, no upload, on the free plan.
• Sign PDFsSign a PDF on your phone for free: draw your signature once in Doc Scanner, reuse it on any page, export with no watermark. For iPhone and Android.