Guides

Practical guides on OCR, PDF conversion, and working with scanned documents -- from the team building Scanquil.

• How to Extract Text from a Scanned PDF -- A scanned PDF looks like a normal document, but it's actually just a picture of one -- which is why you can't select, copy, or search its text the way you can with a PDF someone typed. Here's how to tell the difference, and how to actually get usable text out of one.
• How to Convert a Scanned PDF to an Editable Word Document -- Microsoft Word can open a scanned PDF, but it can't edit the text inside it -- because there isn't any text, just an image of a page. Getting an actually-editable Word document out of a scan means reading it with OCR first, then rebuilding it as a real document.
• How to Pull a Table Out of a PDF into Excel -- A PDF full of numbers is easy to read but painful to actually work with -- you can't sort it, sum it, or drop it into a spreadsheet without retyping it. Here's how to get a PDF's tables into Excel without doing that by hand, and which tool to reach for depending on what you actually need.
• How to Turn a Photo of Handwritten Notes into Text -- Typed text is the easy case for OCR. Handwriting is a genuinely harder problem -- and knowing why makes it much easier to get a good result out of a photo of your own notes.
• How to Combine, Reorder, and Password-Protect PDF Pages Online -- Merging two PDFs, dropping a couple of pages, fixing the order, and locking the result with a password used to mean four different tools -- or one desktop app you had to install. Here's how to do all of it in one pass, entirely in your browser.