Make a scanned PDF searchable
A scan is a picture of a contract: you cannot search it, copy a clause out of it or have it read. This writes the text back into the file — the pages keep looking exactly as they did.
Free · No account needed · Your file is never stored
Files are processed in memory and never stored on our servers.
Your document
Recognising the text
0s
We could not do that
Your searchable PDF is ready.
It is a real document again — now find out what it says.
LegalValidate can read it now that the text is there, and flag the clauses worth arguing about.
How it works
Upload
Drop in your file — nothing is stored on our servers.
We process it
A scan is a picture of a contract: you cannot search it, copy a clause out of it or have it read. This writes the text back into the file — the pages keep looking exactly as they did.
Download and analyze
Take the result, then find out what the document actually commits you to.
Why use LegalValidate for make a scanned pdf searchable
The pages look exactly as they did
The text is written underneath the image, not over it. Stamps, signatures and layout are untouched.
Only the pages that need it
Pages that already carry text are copied across as they are — re-recognising them would be slower and less accurate.
It unlocks everything downstream
Once a scan has text it can be searched, copied from, converted to Word or Excel, and read by the AI review.
Three languages
English, Russian and Uzbek. The language is chosen explicitly, because guessing wrong produces gibberish.
When you need this
- A signed paper contract was scanned and now nobody can search it.
- You need to convert an old scanned agreement to Word.
- The AI review cannot read your document because there is no text in it.
- An archive of scanned contracts has to become findable.
What this tool will not do
- Up to 30 pages per document.
- Handwritten notes and signatures are not recognised as text — nor should they be trusted if they were.
- Recognition quality follows scan quality. A shadowed, angled phone photo produces worse text than a flat 300 DPI scan, whatever the software.
- The file gets somewhat larger, because it now carries both the image and the text.
Make a scanned PDF searchable — questions
Does it change how my document looks? +
No. The visible pages are untouched; a text layer is added underneath. That is the whole design — a scan of a signed contract must keep looking like a scan of a signed contract.
What if only some pages are scans? +
Only those pages are processed. Pages that already have text are copied across unchanged, and the result tells you how many needed recognising.
What is the difference from OCR PDF? +
OCR PDF hands you the text and stops. This hands you the document, so the next step — search, convert, review, sign — is possible at all.
Is the document a contract?
The same file can be read against six criteria — clarity, risk protection, enforceability, balance of terms, structure and overall exposure — free and without an account.
Need to do more than one thing to this document?
Open it in the document workspace instead: upload once, then reorder, rotate, delete, merge and compress without sending the file again.
Open the document workspace