Make a Scan Searchable, and What It Still Gets Wrong
Recognition adds a text layer under the picture of your page. What that makes possible, and the five kinds of mistake worth expecting.
Written against the Aug 8, 2026 release·what has changed since
A scanned page is a photograph. There are no characters in it, which is why searching finds nothing and selecting gives you a rectangle instead of a sentence. Recognition reads the picture and writes an invisible text layer underneath it, aligned with what you can see.
The picture stays exactly as it was. Nothing on the page moves, and nothing about how it prints changes. What changes is that the words are now findable.
Recognise text in a scan
Recognize English, French, or Spanish text and add a searchable invisible text layer.
What this makes possible
- Searching the document, and finding the page a phrase is on.
- Selecting and copying a paragraph instead of retyping it.
- A screen reader having something to read, where before there was nothing.
- Any later search across a folder of documents finding this one.
Five mistakes worth expecting
Recognition is a very good guess, not a transcription. The errors are systematic rather than random, which means you can predict where to check:
- Lookalike characters. Zero and capital O, one and lowercase l, five and S. These cluster in exactly the places that matter: reference numbers, account numbers, amounts.
- Handwriting. Printed text is what this is for. Handwriting is recognised poorly or not at all.
- Faint or skewed pages. A pale photocopy or a page scanned at an angle loses accuracy quickly. A straight, well lit scan is worth more than any setting.
- Columns and tables. The words are usually right and their order often is not, because the reading order of a complex layout has to be inferred.
- Unusual fonts and stamps. Decorative type, a rubber stamp over text, or a watermark crossing a line all disrupt it.
Getting the best out of it
- 1
Straighten and rotate first
Recognition assumes horizontal lines of text. A page that is upside down or on its side produces very little.
- 2
Choose the right language
The language decides which characters and which accents are expected. A French document recognised as English loses its accents and gains nonsense.
- 3
Scan brighter rather than darker
Detail lost to a dark scan cannot be recovered. Slightly overexposed is easier to read than slightly underexposed.
- 4
Search for something you know is there
The fastest way to tell whether it worked is to search for a word you can see on the page. If it is not found, nothing else will be either.
- Recognition adds an invisible text layer and changes nothing you can see.
- Errors cluster in digits and reference numbers, which is where they cost most.
- Handwriting, faint scans, skew and complex columns are the weak cases.
- Straighten, pick the language, scan bright, then search for a word you can see.
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