FubakoMake a Scanned PDF Searchable on Mac (Free, No Upload)
A PDF from a scanner or copier is just a picture of text — pressing ⌘F finds nothing. This page shows how to make it searchable on a Mac, for free and entirely offline.
Why your PDF isn't searchable
PDFs exported from Word or Excel contain real text data, so search and copy work. A scanned PDF contains only an image per page. To make it searchable you need OCR (optical character recognition) — and crucially, the recognized text must be embedded back into the PDF as an invisible layer. That's called a "searchable PDF".
What macOS gives you — and doesn't
Surprisingly, Preview.app can't do this. Live Text lets you select text on screen, but there is no way to save the recognition into the file, so the PDF stays unsearchable and Spotlight can't index it. Your traditional options:
| Method | Cost | Stays on your Mac | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe Acrobat Pro | Subscription | Local, but sign-in required | Easy |
| Web OCR services | Free–paid | No — you upload the file | Easy |
| Tesseract (terminal) | Free | Yes | Command line |
| Fubako | Free | Yes (no network permission) | Drag & drop |
How to do it in Fubako
- Open the scanned PDF in Fubako (drag & drop)
- Click "Make Searchable" in the toolbar
- OCR runs page by page and embeds the invisible text layer
Recognition uses Apple's on-device Vision framework (the same engine as Live Text) and handles English, Japanese, and mixed documents. The visible page doesn't change by a single pixel — but ⌘F search, text copying, and Spotlight full-text search all start working.
FAQ
Does it overwrite my original file?
OCR applies to the open document and participates in macOS autosave and Versions — you can revert anytime via File > Revert To.
Does it read handwriting?
Apple Vision targets printed text. Neat handwriting is often recognized; cursive is less reliable.
Is there a page limit?
No. Large documents are processed with automatically bounded parallelism to keep memory in check.