Searchable PDF

Last Updated: May 19, 2026

Searchable PDF automatically processes scanned documents at scan time to produce a PDF with an invisible text layer. This text layer makes the document fully searchable and allows text selection and copying without any post-processing or third-party tools.

Key Points

  • This feature is only available upon request. Reach out to your Vasion representative for more details.
  • Supports, Simplified Scanning features. For more details refer to Simplified Scanning.
  • Documents are searchable immediately after scanning, with no additional steps required.
  • The Searchable PDF feature is powered by Tesseract, an OCR engine bundled directly into the Service Client. No manual installation is required.
  • English and Chinese Simplified language packs are included by default.
  • Original scan image quality is preserved in the searchable PDF output.
  • Target processing time is under 10 seconds per page at 300 DPI.

How It Works

When a user scans a document using the Control Panel Application (CPA), the Service Client passes it to the OCR engine, which analyzes the image and generates an invisible text layer embedded in the PDF output. The resulting file looks identical to a standard scanned PDF but supports full-text search, text selection, and copying. If processing encounters an error then the feature fails gracefully, and the original scanned PDF is delivered to the user and marked as complete.

Requirements

Searchable PDF requires the following:

  • Contact your Vasion representative to enable this feature.
  • Service Client running Printer Apps version (x) or later.
  • Scan to Storage or Scan to Email installed on the printer.

Supported Printer Manufacturers

Searchable PDF is supported on the following manufacturers:

  • Canon.
  • Fujifilm.
  • Fuji Xerox.
  • HP.
  • Konica Minolta.
  • Kyocera.
  • Lexmark.
  • Ricoh.
  • Sharp.
  • Toshiba.
  • Xerox.

Enable Searchable PDF

To enable Searchable PDF:

  1. In the Admin Console, go to Tools then Settings then Scanning.
  2. Expand the Scan Settings section.
  3. Select the box for Enable Searchable PDFs.
  4. Select Save in the upper-right corner.

Enable Searchable PDFs setting as seen in the admin console.

Once enabled, OCR processes scanned PDF files to make them searchable.