Make a scanned PDF searchable and smaller

1 min read·25 July 2026

A scanned PDF is often a large, unsearchable image. With OCR you make the text searchable; with compression you make the file smaller. PDFrust offers both.

Why edit a scan?

Scans are stored as images — text is not selectable or searchable. Scans are also often larger than necessary (3–10 MB per page). With OCR the text is recognised; with compression the file becomes smaller.

Apply OCR with PDFrust

Open the OCR tool on PDFrust. Upload your scanned PDF. PDFrust uses Tesseract.js to recognise text and add a searchable text layer. Download the searchable PDF.

PDF OCR — scan to text

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Compress the scan

Open the Compress tool. Upload the (optionally OCR-processed) PDF. Choose the compression level. Scans with high resolution can become 60–80% smaller without noticeable on-screen quality loss.

Scan resolution and quality

For archiving, 300 DPI is recommended. For web or email, 150 DPI is sufficient. If your scan was made at 600 DPI, compression can effectively downscale it to a smaller file.