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How to make words in PDF files searchable or how to extract the words

I can scan documents, whiteboards and turn them into nice B&W PDF's.

How do I make those PDF's and the words in them searchable?

How do I use the OCR feature to extract recognizable words from the PDF?

I have tried to make PDF's of nicely typed words, the searching for those words in the Dropbox folders, but they do not appear in the search result.

Thanks!

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Accepted answers

Jay

Hi there, firstly, I’m assuming you’re using this on a mobile app associated with a Dropbox Business plan, or a paired personal account.

Are you scanning the documents using the built in scanner in the Dropbox mobile app?

If not, then it won’t be able to detect the letters since the OCR function only works on docs scanned with that feature, and not from third party scanners.

Hope this helps!

Jay

Actually, the OCR works like your wish. You don't need to physically be in a doc to search it.

You can just conduct a normal search through the website or mobile app, and provided it was scanned by the mobile app, it will detect that text and bring up that document in the search results.

All comments

Jay

Hi there, firstly, I’m assuming you’re using this on a mobile app associated with a Dropbox Business plan, or a paired personal account.

Are you scanning the documents using the built in scanner in the Dropbox mobile app?

If not, then it won’t be able to detect the letters since the OCR function only works on docs scanned with that feature, and not from third party scanners.

Hope this helps!

kontz_bern

As mentioned above, you have an option to export your PDF's data to OCR only if the scan has been made through the basic Dropbox scanner and there's no option to do so if it hasn't. The only solution comes to my mind to you is to try editing this document with a tool like this one https://form-cd-401s.pdffiller.com/ Yes, it's not related to Dropbox and also a paid one, but there's a free trial period so you can just do this very OCR here and that's all. I did so and Dropbox detects the text and images from the files made in this way pretty well

KJ01

Hi kontz_bern,

Thank you. This is not quite what I was looking for.

In the mean time, I think I figured it out and I realize that Dropbox does not provide the functionality I am looking for.

Dropbox is fine if you scan an entire document and you can select that (scanned) document and search for words.

What I wan to do is:

I work in an environment where we have many brainstorming sessions at whiteboards. We/I then take a picture of the whiteboard to capture the thoughts for later. This turns into dozens or hundreds of whiteboard pictures every year.

I want to capture them with Dropbox scanner and then be able to search the entire library (Folder structure) of scans for particular words or terms. Dropbox does not provide this function. If I have to first find the scan with the info I am searching for, it's a moot point.

Wish list:

Ability of Dropbox to index OCR's content of files and then allow for searching of a folder structure containing Dropbox scanned/OCR'd files.

Thanks!

Jay

KJ01

Hi AgentJay,

Indeed, it does work. I went through the process again, scanned a couple of documents, dropped them into a folder, did a search and the search worked. I don't know what happened the first several times. The fact that multiple searches on the topic had plenty of discussions about how to scan, but nothing on the (admittedly simple) search function made me believe that it didn't work as I wanted.

Thanks again to everybody.

Jay

Thanks for getting back to me on this matter. Have a great week ahead!