PDF, Word, or Scanned? How to Digitize Contracts for Flawless AI Review

A contract’s format decides whether an AI review is possible at all. A digital PDF is read directly. A scan is a photograph of a contract — until it has a text layer, there is nothing in the file to read, and any tool that claims otherwise is guessing.

Here is how to get a document ready, whether it started as a signed paper page or a legacy file.

---

What each format actually is

Format	What the file contains	What to do first
Digital PDF	Real text, positioned on a page	Nothing — this is the ideal input
Word (.docx)	Real text, plus revision history	Accept or reject tracked changes, then send as-is
Scanned PDF	Pictures of pages, often no text at all	Make it searchable
Photo (JPG/PNG)	One picture, usually at an angle	Turn it into a PDF, then make it searchable

The gap between the top and bottom rows is not a matter of a few percent of accuracy. It is the difference between a document that can be read and one that cannot.

---

Step 1: Getting paper into a file

What you need: a phone. Any scanner app will do.

Then:

• Scan at 300 DPI — lower loses thin type, higher only makes the file bigger.
• Flatten the page. Shadows in a fold and curled edges cost more accuracy than resolution ever gains.
• Keep colour for pages with ink signatures or stamps; black-and-white is fine for the rest and much smaller.
• One page per image, in order.

Got several photos rather than one file? JPG → PDF turns each into a page, and Merge PDF puts them into a single document.

---

Step 2: Give the scan a text layer

This is the step that matters.

Scanned PDF → Searchable PDF runs text recognition over the pages that need it and writes the result back into the file. The pages look exactly as they did — nothing is redrawn — but from then on the document can be searched, copied out of, converted, and reviewed.

Two details worth knowing:

• Pages that already carry text are left alone. Most “scanned” contracts have already been through a scanner that did its own OCR, and re-recognising those pages would be slower and less accurate than reading what is there.
• Pick the right language. English, Russian and Uzbek are supported. A Cyrillic contract read as English comes back as nonsense.

If all you need is the wording — to paste into an email or compare two versions — PDF → Text hands back the text itself, and Image → Text does the same for a single photo.

---

Step 3: Tidy up before the review

Things that genuinely make a document harder to read, and what fixes them:

• Tracked changes — accept or reject them in Word first. A reviewer cannot tell a deleted clause from a live one.
• Pages the scanner turned sideways — rotate them in the workspace.
• The annexes in five separate files — merge them so the terms and the schedule are read together.
• A duplicate or blank page — delete it.
• A file too big to email — compress it.

If you need more than one of these, do them in the document workspace: it takes the upload once instead of asking for the file again between every step.

---

Special cases

Signed contracts with ink signatures. Scan in colour so the signature stays legible. The signature block does not interfere with the analysis — what matters is the terms above it.

Foreign-language documents. Text recognition covers English, Russian and Uzbek. The AI review reads the document in the language it is written in.

Handwritten amendments. Recognition is unreliable on handwriting, and it is exactly the part of a contract you least want guessed at. Type the amendment into the document, or have a person read it.

---

Key takeaways

1. Digital PDF > Word > scanned PDF > photo. Every step down is more that has to be reconstructed.
2. A scan without a text layer cannot be reviewed by anything. Fix that first — it takes seconds and it is free.
3. Flatten the page and scan at 300 DPI. It costs nothing and beats every trick afterwards.

Next step: put the prepared document through a free AI review — risks, obligations and the clauses worth arguing about, no account needed.