Nüsha OCR
Why can’t I copy text from a scanned PDF?
Understand selectable text versus page images and follow a practical workflow for turning a scan into editable Word.
A PDF may contain text, images or both. Seeing letters on the screen does not mean that the file includes a usable text layer.
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How to use it
- Try selecting and copying a sentence in a PDF viewer.
- If the page is an image, process a sample with the appropriate OCR profile.
- Compare the result with the source, save corrections and export Word.
First check: image or text?
If copied text is empty or consists of incorrect characters, the page may be an image or have a faulty text layer. Check several pages: one selectable page does not establish that the whole document has the same structure.
Second check: reading order
For a two-column article, follow where the first column ends. Verify that headers, footnotes and body text are read in the right order. Names, dates and numbers deserve a separate visual check after OCR.
Review your results
Copying problems alone do not prove that OCR is necessary. File permissions or font encoding may also be responsible.