Google Chrome is rolling out a feature that allows users to copy text from scanned PDFs. This has been a long time coming.
One of the most frustrating things about opening a PDF in Chrome is that there is always a chance the original document was scanned and not created digitally. In that case, none of the text would be visible to Chrome’s PDF viewer, meaning none could be copied as text. It also means Chrome’s page search was useless.
In a recent update, Google made the PDF viewer a little more robust. Chrome can now distinguish text in scanned documents. This means text can be copied, selected, and searched for with “Ctrl + F.”
This feature was initially introduced in the Chrome Beta, but it appears to have rolled out to more users. The new tool acts as a resource for users to find text in documents, even if they were optically imported. A digital file will carry that signature over, where Chrome could always detect text, but scanned files didn’t have that text signature, making them unreadable to Chrome’s PDF viewer.
The feature works in the exact same way as it would for a normal PDF when copying text in Chrome. Highlighting text will allow you to copy, and searching the page will showcase results for the phrase entered. There doesn’t seem to be any difference in the viewer from one document to another.
It was only a matter of time before Chrome introduced this feature, considering Google Lens has become such a prominent part of the web browser. Detecting text was already a function, but it didn’t feel quite as baked-in as this.
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