While this is useful when you are creating new PDFs from Chrome or Edge, what about existing files that had previously been saved as image only, or that you received as email? Is there a way to “fix” those so that they are searchable?

After you install the separate Win2PDF Desktop with OCR package, Win2PDF displays an extra save as type labeled “ Portable Document Format – Searchable (OCR PDF)”.

Download and install the Win2PDF Desktop with OCR Download.This version can be downloaded from the Win2PDF 10 Update section of our knowledgebase. Download and install Win2PDF 10.0.78 (or higher).To try this feature, please do the following: This feature is still in our pre-release testing phase, but we want users to try this and give us some feedback. Now, it’s just a single save like it would be from any other application. This has been frequently reported to our Win2PDF help desk as a problem for users and prior to this feature we had to explain a multi-step process to get the desired results. It applies Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to the file and converts the image-based text into searchable text automatically. When you use this save option when printing from Chrome, Edge, or Google Docs, the resulting PDF file will contain searchable text. We’ve solved this problem by adding a new save format called “ Portable Document Format – Searchable (OCR PDF)”.

However it is a problem if you are using Win2PDF or another PDF printer since the files will be larger, non-searchable, and non-selectable. When documents or web pages are printed to a paper printer, this isn’t noticeable or an issue. Due to the way Google and Microsoft have developed their browsers and apps, printing from these programs creates PDF files that are image-based and not-searchable (or selectable) as actual text. Why this feature? When would you use it? Well, there is one area in particular where this is useful, and that’s when it comes to printing PDF files from Google’s Chrome web browser, Microsoft’s newest Edge browser, or from other Google apps like Docs.

Win2PDF now has a feature that allows you to print documents that would normally contain non-searchable text to PDF files with searchable text.

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