How to Make PDF Searchable – The Ultimate Guide

Reasons why PDF files cannot be searched within the text

Scanned PDFs frequently don’t contain searchable text, as they are typically stored as images during the scanning process, which means they lack embedded character data necessary for computerized text recognition.

To enable searching within PDF files, the content must be encoded with searchable text characters. How can we make PDF content searchable? Here’s an effective method.

Convert PDFs to Searchable Formats with Renee PDF Aide

To enhance the searchability of PDF files that do not contain character codes, utilize the OCR engine provided by Renee PDF Aide. This tool enables the conversion of PDF images into searchable Word documents. Follow the detailed steps below for the conversion process.

What is Renee PDF Aide

Renee PDF Aide is a professional and efficient PDF toolkit that enables users to easily perform various optimization and conversion tasks. These include repairing damaged files, enhancing the loading time of large documents, splitting and merging PDFs, specifying pages, adjusting file orientation, and encrypting/decrypting files. Additionally, users can add multi-form watermarks to secure their documents and convert PDFs to different formats with impressive speed.

Renee PDF Aide features advanced OCR technology to convert PDFs into editable formats such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Image, HTML, and TXT. It supports nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Choosing the appropriate OCR language enhances character recognition accuracy and conversion efficiency, making it user-friendly for even novice computer users.

1. Download and install Renee PDF Aide, open the software, and select the “Convert PDF” function.

2. To edit conveniently, convert the PDF to Word format by clicking the ‘Add Files’ button to import the PDF, selecting the page number to convert, enabling OCR in settings, and then clicking ‘Convert’ at the bottom right to start the conversion.

3. After converting the PDF file to a Word file, open the Word file. Since character data has been added to the non-searchable PDF image data through the OCR function, you can search by pressing “Ctrl+F” at this time.

That’s all for converting an unsearchable PDF to a searchable Word format with Renee PDF Aide.

Renee PDF Aide not only offers format conversion but also features a robust suite of PDF editing tools that are user-friendly. Open the application, navigate to the “PDF Toolset” tab, and use the (Add Files) button to upload your documents. The top menu bar provides various editing options, including repair, optimization, splitting, merging, rotating, encryption/decryption, watermarking, and converting images to PDF. It supports batch processing for efficiency. Once edits are complete, hit the “Convert” button to save the updated PDF to your chosen location quickly.

PDF Tools editing function

• Repair: Repair damaged or unopenable PDF files.
• Optimiza: optimize PDF files that take a long time to load, or compress PDF image data and data streams to make it load more smoothly in scenarios such as online pages.
• Split: Split a multi-page PDF file into multiple files or a single file according to individual needs.
• Merge: Merge and output multiple PDFs into one PDF, where users can specify specific pages that need to be merged.
• Rotate: Adjust the display angle of the PDF file.
• Encrypt/ Decrypt: PDF is encrypted and locked, or PDF files with passwords are decrypted. At the same time, during the process of decrypting PDF files, all restrictions added to the PDF files (such as digital signatures) will be deleted accordingly.
• Watermark: Add foreground watermark/background watermark to PDF files, and users can customize the format and style of watermark files.
• Image to PDF: Convert multiple or single images into one or more PDF files for easy browsing or use in specific scenarios.

How to convert processed searchable files back to PDF format?

After using Renee PDF Aide to convert PDF to a searchable Word file, what should I do if I want to convert the Word document back to PDF format?

The process is straightforward. Numerous online platforms offer free format conversion services, like Smallpdf. Simply visit the Smallpdf website (https://smallpdf.com), choose the ‘Word to PDF’ feature, and upload or drag your Word document into the designated area. After uploading, click ‘Convert’. Once the conversion is done, download the PDF to your local device.

It is worth mentioning that after adding characters through Renee PDF Aide, the converted PDF file also becomes a directly searchable PDF file, after which users can directly search in the PDF file.