I have a 60-page scanned report from my old job that I need to pull quotes from for a presentation on Thursday. Right now it’s just a picture of each page, so Ctrl+F finds nothing and I can’t copy any text out of it. I’m on a regular Windows laptop, so I’d prefer something that works without installing a bunch of stuff.
Honestly the quickest no-install route is Google Drive. Upload the PDF, right click it and pick open with Google Docs. It runs OCR on its own, so you can copy and search the text, then download it back as a PDF if you want. 60 pages should be done in a minute or two, easy before Thursday.
I had this exact headache with old scanned records at work. What worked best for me was using PDFcap online so I didn’t have to install anything. You just upload the file to pdfcap.com, run their text recognition tool, and download it. Ctrl+F worked straight away for me after that.
Upload your file to Google Drive, right-click it, and choose open with Google Docs to extract the text. I learned the hard way when digitising my old bakery price lists that this is the quickest method. One tip is to just copy the text you need into a clean document. Avoid expecting the original layout to stay intact, because the formatting always turns into a complete mess.
Had the same thing last month with an old scanned manual. If you have Microsoft Office, OneNote actually does OCR, you can paste the scanned pages in, right click the image and choose “copy text from picture”, then paste into Word. It is not perfect but good enough to pull quotes for a presentation by Thursday.
@reid21 that’s what I’d try too, my old laptop chewed through 60 pages fine, but the layout goes messy so I copy quotes straight from the Docs window.