How to scan documents to searchable PDF files

If you don’t already have a scanner, and scanning to searchable PDF files is the only thing you need to do, you will find many document scanners that can perform this function. Most desktop and high-speed document scanners come with software that has this basic capability. However these often have limited functionality and you may prefer a more robust application.

To create searchable PDFs with any scanner, use Desktop OCR software applications like FineReader, ReadIRIS, or OmniPage. These programs can also be used to convert images to MS Word, Excel, and other editable formats.

There are also more affordable PDF converters that have fewer OCR features and limit output to PDF files.

You can find a complete guide to OCR software here.

For high-volume applications, use OCR servers to give everyone on your network the ability to create searchable PDFs on a dedicated server.

Enterprise site licensing, concurrent user licensing and cloud-based solutions are also available. Please contact us for more information or a quote for desktop OCR and PDF converter site licensing options.

You may use SimpleIndex to automatically extract data from searchable PDFs for indexing, automatic file naming, and integration with custom database or document management applications. This is a very fast and accurate way to set keyword metadata for searching. It has both Tesseract and FineReader OCR options for creating searchable PDFs, and is available in desktop or server versions.