Getting better OCR from a scanned PDF

Practical checks for scan quality, language selection and recognized text before you rely on a searchable PDF.

Updated October 4, 2026

Check the scan before recognizing text

OCR works from the pixels on each page. Upright text, clear contrast and sharp edges give it a better starting point. If a page is sideways or upside down, rotate it before OCR. A scan photographed at an angle may need correction in the source scanning application; simple page rotation does not repair perspective.

Avoid judging quality only from a small preview. Zoom in on the smallest text and look for blur, clipped edges and shadows. Increasing the size of a blurry image does not restore lost letter shapes.

Select the document language

Language selection helps recognition interpret letters and common word patterns. FolioSprint provides English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian and Portuguese. The combined English-and-Russian setting is useful for documents containing both scripts. Choose the closest supported language instead of assuming English will handle every scan equally well.

Understand the output

OCR PDF produces a PDF that keeps a visual page image and adds recognized text. You can search or select that text in a compatible reader. The result is not a complete editable reconstruction of the original page. Use PDF to Word afterwards if you need to work with extracted paragraphs, and expect to review the conversion.

Verify the characters that matter

Recognition errors often affect similar characters such as a zero and the letter O, or a one and a lowercase l. Check names, dates, totals, reference numbers and mathematical symbols against the visible scan. Search for several known words on different pages to confirm that the text layer exists throughout the output.

Work in manageable sections

Long, high-resolution scans need more processing time. If a document exceeds your plan’s page or file limit, split it into useful sections. This also makes quality review easier: you can identify and retry the part with a difficult scan without repeating the entire job.