How to edit a scanned PDF

A scanned PDF looks like a document but is really a stack of photos. There is no text to select until you add a text layer with OCR.

First, recognise the text

Run OCR (optical character recognition) to detect words in the image and produce selectable, searchable text. Without this, "find" and "copy" do nothing.

Then annotate on top

You can still stamp, whiteout, sign and add text boxes over a scan even before OCR — annotations sit above the image.

Cleaning up

Deskew crooked scans, remove blank backs, and crop scanner borders to make the document tidy and smaller.