Search Scanned Documents Right in Your Browser (No Upload)

You open a scanned PDF — an old contract, a receipt, a form someone faxed — press Ctrl+F, type a word you can plainly see on the page, and get nothing. No matches. The text is right there, but your browser can't find it.

That's not a bug. A scanned PDF is just images of pages, and there's no text in an image for find to read. Highlighty fixes this on your device: it reads the pictures so the scan becomes searchable, then lets you search and highlight it like any other document.

TL;DR

• A scanned PDF is images of pages with no selectable text, so ordinary find returns nothing.
• Highlighty's on-device OCR reads those images and makes the scan searchable.
• Open the scan in Highlighty's PDF viewer, then search, highlight, and navigate like any document.
• Multi-keyword colors, scrollbar markers, and the X-Ray context panel all apply.
• No upload — the page image never leaves your computer.
• Honest limit: OCR is English-only in this first release. It works on selectable-text PDFs too.

Why normal find comes up empty on a scan

When you scan or photograph a document into a PDF, each page becomes an image — a picture of the words, not the words themselves. To your eyes it looks like text. To the browser it's a flat image, and there's nothing to match against when you search.

You can usually tell the difference with a quick test: try to select a line of text with your cursor. If nothing highlights and you can't copy it, it's a scan, and that's why find keeps coming up empty.

How Highlighty makes a scan searchable

Highlighty runs OCR — optical character recognition — which reads the image and works out what the words are. Once it has done that, the scan behaves like a normal text document: you can search it, and your matches highlight.

The important part is where this happens. The OCR runs on your device. The page image is processed on your computer and never uploaded to any server or third-party service to be read. That matters whether the scan is mundane or something you're not allowed to share.

Open the scan in Highlighty's PDF viewer

Highlighty works on PDFs you open through its own PDF viewer, and that covers both a file on your computer and a remote PDF on the web. Open the scan there and, once it's readable, everything Highlighty does on a normal page is available.

Search, color, and navigate it like any document

After the scan is searchable, the rest is the same workflow you'd use anywhere in Highlighty:

• Multi-keyword colors: save several keywords in the popup, each with its own color, and they all highlight at once across the document.
• Scrollbar markers: turn them on (Popup → Basic → Notification settings) to see where every match sits along the scrollbar and jump between them.
• X-Ray (Context Minimap): a draggable panel that gathers the text around each match into one place, so you can read the context without scrolling around. It's on by default.

So a scanned ten-page form stops being something you read line by line, and becomes something you can question — every mention of a term, lit up in color, with the surrounding text one glance away.

The honest limits

Two things worth saying plainly. First, OCR is English-only in this first release. A scan in another language won't be read yet.

Second, OCR works best on a clean scan. Very faint, skewed, or low-resolution pages are harder for any OCR to read accurately. And if a PDF already has selectable text, you don't need OCR at all — Highlighty searches it directly, in whatever language it's written in.

Frequently asked questions

Why can't I find text in my scanned PDF?

Because a scanned PDF is made of images of the pages, not actual text. There's nothing for ordinary find to match against, even though you can see the words. Highlighty's on-device OCR reads the images so the scan becomes searchable.

How do I make a scanned PDF searchable?

Open it through Highlighty's PDF viewer. Highlighty runs OCR on your device to read the page images, and from then on you can search and highlight the scan like any other document — multi-keyword colors, scrollbar markers, and X-Ray included.

Is my scan uploaded anywhere for OCR?

No. The OCR runs on your computer. The page image is processed locally and never uploaded to any server or third-party service to be read.

What languages does the OCR support?

English only in this first release. A scan in another language won't be read yet. Note that PDFs which already have selectable text are searched directly, in whatever language they're written in — OCR only applies to image-only scans.

Does it also work on normal PDFs that aren't scanned?

Yes. Selectable-text PDFs work directly, without needing OCR, and the same search, colors, scrollbar markers, and X-Ray apply. OCR is just what kicks in for scans that have no selectable text.

Is the OCR feature free?

Yes. On-device OCR, PDF search, multi-keyword colors, scrollbar markers, and X-Ray are all in the free, ad-free version. Free use needs no account and sends nothing to any server.