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How to copy text from a scanned PDF (or a photo)

You try to highlight a sentence in a scanned PDF and nothing happens. That's because the page is a picture. Here's how to turn it into real text you can copy, search and paste.

By the PDF ProMaster team · Fact-checked 27 October 2026

Quick answer: a scanned page is a picture, so there's no text to select until it's read with OCR (optical character recognition). For a scanned PDF, open OCR PDF, choose the document's language and press Make PDF searchable. For a photo or screenshot, open Image to Text, press Get text, then Copy text. Both run in your browser, so your file isn't uploaded.

Why you can't select text in a scan

When a scanner or phone camera captures a page, it saves a picture of the paper. To your PDF reader, the letters are just dark and light dots, the same as a photo of a cat. A PDF made from a Word document is different: it stores real letters, so you can select, search and copy them.

Optical character recognition fixes this. Adobe describes OCR as technology that "converts printed text, scanned documents, and images into machine-readable, searchable, and editable digital text." The software looks at the shapes in the picture and works out which letters they are.

How to tell if your PDF is a scan

  • Try to select a sentence. If the cursor draws a box over the whole page, or nothing gets highlighted, the page is a picture.
  • Search for a word you can see. Press Ctrl + F (⌘ + F on a Mac). If a word that's clearly on the page isn't found, there's no text layer.
  • Zoom in. Scanned letters get fuzzy or blocky at high zoom. Real text stays sharp.

Some scanner apps run OCR for you, so a scan can already be searchable. If you can select the text, you can copy it straight away. If you can select it but search still finds nothing, see why a PDF isn't searchable.

Copy text from a scanned PDF

  1. Open OCR PDF and choose your PDF. It's opened on your device and isn't uploaded.
  2. Choose the language of the document. If it mixes another language with English, such as Hindi with English names, keep Also read English words ticked.
  3. Leave Only pages without text selected, so pages that already have real text are left alone.
  4. Press Make PDF searchable. Each page takes a few seconds on a computer, and longer on a phone.
  5. Download the searchable PDF. It looks exactly the same, but you can now select, search and copy the words. If you only want the words, choose Download text only (.txt).

The first time, the recognition engine and your language download from our site (about 5 to 15 MB). OCR PDF handles up to 300 pages at a time; split longer files first with Split PDF.

Want to edit the text, not just copy it? PDF to Word reads scanned pages with OCR and gives you a Word document. Choose Editable text and the language. Recognized text comes out plain, without bold or italic.

Copy text from a photo or screenshot

  1. Open Image to Text and add your images. JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and BMP work, up to 100 at a time. On a computer you can paste a screenshot with Ctrl + V (⌘ + V on a Mac).
  2. Choose the language and press Get text.
  3. Fix any mistakes in the text box, then press Copy text, or Download .txt. Download searchable PDF turns the images into a PDF with the text hidden behind each one.

28 languages, and why the choice matters

OCR uses the language you pick to work out which letters and words it's looking at. Choose the wrong one and accents, characters and whole words can come out wrong. PDF ProMaster's OCR PDF and Image to Text read 28 languages: English, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Marathi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu and Vietnamese.

How to get accurate results

  • Scan at 300 dpi. Adobe's scanning help says black-and-white scanning at 300 dpi produces text best suited for conversion for most pages. At 150 dpi, accuracy is slightly lower. At 400 dpi and above, it's slower and files are bigger. For very small print (9 point or smaller), Adobe suggests a higher resolution.
  • Keep it straight. Adobe advises checking that the scan is high quality, with plenty of light, and not skewed. Google's Drive help adds that documents must be right side up.
  • Use good, even light. For photos, avoid shadows and glare, and hold the phone straight above the page.
  • Fill the frame. Google says text should be at least 10 pixels high. In practice, crop away the desk around the page so the words are as large as possible.
  • Black and white beats color for plain documents. Adobe recommends scanning in black and white whenever possible, and raising brightness and contrast for text on colored paper.
  • Handwriting is hard. Our tools are made for printed text and read only very neat handwriting, and not reliably.

Need a scan that's small and searchable? The Recommended and Smallest file levels in Compress PDF redraw pages as pictures, which removes any hidden text. In the PDF ProMaster Workspace you can turn on compression and Searchable text in the same download: the pages are compressed first, then read with OCR.

Check the result

OCR is good, but not perfect. Before you rely on the text:

  • Check names, numbers, dates and amounts against the original.
  • Watch for look-alike characters: 0 and O, 1 and l, 5 and S, rn and m.
  • Tables and columns come out as plain lines of text, so you may need to tidy them.
  • If almost nothing was found, check the language setting, and try a sharper scan.

Built-in options on your phone or computer

If the text is on your phone already, these can be quicker for a line or two:

  • iPhone and iPad (Live Text): in the Photos app, open the picture, touch and hold a word, drag the grab points, then tap Copy, or Select All. Tapping the Live Text button in the lower-right corner highlights all the text. Apple says this needs an iPhone XS, iPhone XR or later with iOS 15 or later. Apple's list of Live Text languages includes English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and others, but not Hindi or other Indian languages at the time of writing. On recent versions of iOS, the Preview app on iPhone can also copy text from an image: open it, select the text and tap Copy.
  • Android (Google Lens): in the Google app, tap the Lens icon in the search bar, then take a photo or pick a screenshot. Tap the text, tap Select text, then Copy. In the Google Photos app, open the photo, tap More at the top, and choose Google Lens.
  • Windows (Snipping Tool): press Windows logo key + Shift + S and capture the area. Then select the Text actions button to pick out the text, or use Copy all text. Microsoft says the recognition runs locally on your device.
  • Google Drive: on a computer, right-click a PDF or image in Drive and choose Open with > Google Docs. Google says the file should be 2 MB or smaller, and that lists, tables, columns and footnotes are not likely to be detected. This works on Google's servers, so the file is stored in your Drive.

For whole documents, a searchable PDF is usually more useful than copying piece by piece, because you keep the original look and can search it later.

Questions

Why can't I highlight text in my PDF?

The page is probably a scan or a photo, which is a picture of text rather than real letters. Run it through OCR PDF to add text you can select, search and copy.

Is OCR accurate?

On clear, straight scans of printed text it's usually very good, but it can still mix up similar characters, such as 0 and O or 1 and l. Always check names, numbers and amounts.

Can OCR read handwriting?

Our tools are made for printed text. They read only very neat handwriting, and not reliably.

Does the searchable PDF look different?

No. OCR PDF keeps the original pages exactly as they are and adds the recognized words as invisible text in the right places.

Is my scan uploaded?

No. OCR PDF and Image to Text run in your browser. The recognition engine downloads to your device from our site, and your pages are read there.

Which languages can I use?

28, including English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish and German. Pick the main language of the document.

Try these tools

OCR PDFImage to TextPDF to WordPDF ProMaster Workspace

How we write our guides: the limits, formats and prices of other organisations in this guide are checked against the official pages linked under Sources, on the date shown. Instructions describe only features our tools actually have. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll correct it.

Sources

Apple, iPhone, iPad and Live Text are trademarks of Apple Inc. Google, Android, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Lens and Google Photos are trademarks of Google LLC. Microsoft and Windows are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Adobe is a trademark of Adobe Inc. PDF ProMaster is independent and isn't affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by them. Comparisons are based on the sources above; if anything here is out of date, please let us know and we'll correct it.