When you open a scanned PDF in the Google Chrome PDF viewer, the browser automatically uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert images of text into a searchable and selectable format. This process happens locally on your device, allowing you to highlight, search, copy, and paste text without sending data to Google or third parties.
01How OCR Works in Chrome
Scanned PDFs are essentially images of physical documents, meaning the text is not natively stored as characters. Google Chrome's built-in PDF viewer identifies these documents and applies OCR to extract the text. Once the conversion is complete, you can use standard browser functions like Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F) to find specific words or use your mouse to highlight and copy sections of the document.
02Steps to Use Searchable PDFs
1. Open Google Chrome on your computer. 2. Navigate to the website containing the PDF or open a local PDF file in the browser. 3. Wait for the document to load. If the PDF is a large scanned file, you may see a notification stating 'Extracting text from PDF...'. 4. Once the extraction is finished, click anywhere in the document to begin highlighting text or use the search bar to find specific keywords.
03Important Conditions and Limitations
The availability of text selection depends on the successful completion of the OCR process. For documents with many pages, the conversion may take some time to finish. Additionally, the accuracy of the extracted text depends on the quality of the original scan; blurry or distorted text may not be recognized correctly. This feature is specific to the Chrome PDF viewer; if you choose to download the PDF and open it in a different application, the OCR conversion performed by Chrome will not be saved into the file itself.
Sources & further reading
Put it into practice
Before you convert
A short checklist for choosing an image format and checking the result.
Download checklist (.txt)