A scanned contract is a photograph of a contract. You can read it, but your computer cannot: no search, no copy-and-paste, no way to find the indemnity clause across forty pages except by eye. OCR — optical character recognition — fixes that by reading the picture and adding the words as an invisible layer over the page.
The catch is that the documents people scan are exactly the ones they should not upload. Contracts, IDs, medical records, signed statements. Most OCR happens on someone else’s server. This guide does it on yours.
What OCR produces
Running OCR on a scanned PDF gives you two things:
- A searchable PDF. The page image is untouched; an invisible text layer sits on top of it, aligned with the printed words. Search, selection and copy work as they would in a born-digital document.
- A plain-text file. The recognised words on their own, useful for pasting into a contract-review tool or a spreadsheet.
Nothing is “converted”. The scan remains the scan; the text is an addition.
What decides accuracy
OCR is statistics, and its confidence rises and falls with the input:
- Resolution. 300 DPI is the working standard. A 150 DPI scan or a phone photo at arm’s length loses the small letters first — the serifs on an l and i, the difference between 5 and S.
- Contrast and cleanliness. Grey text on grey paper, coffee rings, and the shadow of a fold all cost characters.
- Skew. A page scanned at an angle confuses line detection. Straighten it first.
- Typeface. Clean printed text recognises well. Stylised fonts less so. Handwriting, honestly, is a gamble.
- Language. Filozy’s engine recognises English. Other languages will come out garbled.
You cannot fix a bad scan with a better algorithm. Rescanning at 300 DPI, flat, in good light, is worth more than any setting.
Step by step
- Trim and straighten first. Open the scan in Auto crop to remove scanner borders and uneven margins. Clean edges help the engine find the text block.
- Open OCR PDF and choose the trimmed file. The recognition engine is downloaded from Filozy’s own servers at this point — it is program code, not your document going the other way.
- Run the tool. Progress and a confidence figure are shown as it works; a low figure on a page is a hint to look closely at that page later.
- Save the searchable PDF, and the text file if you want it.
- Verify before you rely on it. Search the result for a clause you know is there. Compare every number, date, party name and defined term you will act on against the page image. OCR errors cluster in exactly those places: 0 and O, 1 and l, decimal points, currency symbols.
What to do next
The searchable PDF is the input to everything else:
- Need to remove personal information before sharing? Redact PDF can now find the words — and it will run its own local OCR if you skip this step.
- Filing or producing the document? Add Bates numbers with Header, footer & Bates.
- Sending it on? Protect PDF encrypts it on the same device.
A ready-made sequence for this — trim, recognise, number, protect — exists as the Prepare a scanned contract for filing workflow, which carries the file from one tool to the next without re-selecting it.
Honest limits
- Tables are recognised as text, not as cells. For a spreadsheet, run the result through PDF to Excel and expect to check the columns.
- Handwritten annotations are usually missed or misread. If a handwritten date matters, read it yourself.
- Very long documents take time, and a phone has less memory than a laptop. Split a 400-page scan into parts first.
- The text layer is only as good as the scan. A confidence figure of 90% on a legal document means one word in ten may be wrong. That is why step 5 is not optional.