PDF OCR with text search

[djkdjkdjk]

Dropbox Plus. Uploading a scanned PDF, it never gets OCRed to be full text searchable. Chatted with support for ages until they finally decided “oh, that feature requires Pro or above, not Plus because that’s considered image search.” Even though the image search support doc specifically mentions formats NOT including PDFs.

So is that true? A paid Plus account can’t OCR PDFs? If so, (1) Dropbox needs to update their docs because I wasted SOO much time on this today. (2) That’s ridiculous to offer scanning to PDF and full text search but not OCR. And I guess I’ll have to switch to Google.

[Hannah]

Hey @djkdjkdjk, thanks for reaching out to us today.

Actually, with a Dropbox Plus subscription, you should be able to use OCR for PDF files, however, it won't work for PDFs that have text metadata, like scanned or faxed files, so that is probably the culprit here.

Would you mind sending us the ticket number of your communication with our support team, so we can check it out?

In any case, we really appreciate your feedback about all this and I will make sure to pass it on to the team.

Thanks!

[djkdjkdjk]

Ticket# 22372920
I don’t believe the PDFs had any text metadata, but you’ll find I provided a sample PDF attached to the ticket.
Thanks

[Hannah]

Thanks for the ticket number, @djkdjkdjk!

If you try OCR with a different PDF file, that does have text in it, but is not scanned, does it work?

[djkdjkdjk]

Sorry, didn’t get email notification of your reply. I’m not sure I understand. What PDF would not be scanned and also would not have text metadata? Can you give an example? Apologies if I’m being dense. 🙂 Thanks

[Hannah]

No worries!

Just any PDF file that's not scanned, for example a file that you might have downloaded to your computer through the internet.

[dustinek]

I have plenty of PDFs that I've scanned from letters, etc, I'd like them to be OCR converted retrospectively. Do I need a Dropbox Pro subscription (I have Plus)? They've not been converted up to now.

Also they're in Polish if that's an issue but why should it be. 

D.

[djkdjkdjk]

FWIW, I finally gave up and switched to Google Drive. Their free version OCRs PDFs for text search almost instantly. Neither Dropbox nor OneDrive was able to for me, which is ironic since I actually *paid* for them.

[rhut]

Sorry about that -- yes, OCR is only supported for English today and we haven't yet expanded to other languages!

[Arnaud_]

I just switched from kDrive which has a very very effective scan tool which includes OCR to generate  PDF searchable in any PDF viewer. It is available on both Android and iOS kDrive apps.

So I was quite disappointed to find out that a much bigger player such as Dropbox does not feature this.