- Drag it in, choose it, or paste it. It is read here in the tab and never uploaded.
- The settings column holds 3 controls for this tool. The defaults suit most files.
- “Make searchable” works on your device, then Original and Result sit side by side with a download.
About Make searchable
Make searchable reads the words on scanned pages and writes them back as an invisible text layer behind the image, so the document can be searched, copied and read aloud.
A scanned page is a photograph. It looks like text and reads like text, but there is no text in the file — which is why search finds nothing, copying gives nothing, and a screen reader has nothing to say. Recognition reads the words out of the picture and writes them back as an invisible layer sitting exactly over the ink.
Nothing about the page changes visually. The picture you had is the picture you keep; the text goes behind it, aligned word by word, so selecting a line highlights the right part of the image. Pages that already have real text are recognized as such and left alone rather than read again.
Resolution is the accuracy control. 200 DPI is right for ordinary print. 300 DPI is slower and noticeably better on small or faint type — a footnote, a form, a fax. Recognition is never perfect: it is very good on clean, straight, printed pages and poor on handwriting, heavy skew and low contrast.