How to make a PDF searchable
1. Drop the PDF. The first page is drawn in this tab. 2. Pick the language of the page, or the combined option if the scan mixes languages. 3. Press “Make searchable PDF” and download.
Search the download in your PDF reader (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F). You can also copy the text from the box on this page, or save it as TXT.
What “when possible” means
If a page already has a real text layer, GustKit copies that page with pdf-lib. The words stay selectable and the vectors stay sharp. A page with almost no selectable text is treated as a scan: PDF.js draws it, Tesseract reads the words, and pdf-lib writes those words in invisible type on top of a picture of the page.
Letters outside the Latin set are left out of the hidden layer, because that layer uses a standard PDF font. You still see them in the picture. Portuguese and Spanish accents are included.
Scans, phones and long files
A phone photo of a page works after you put it in a PDF (JPG to PDF), then open it here. Handwriting and tiny type are less reliable. This browser handles up to the page limit shown above the button. Split a longer file first.