Second, convert the searchable result to Word. Faithful layout keeps page size and margins, headings, bold and italic, tables, two-column pages and images; Text flow only gives you clean paragraphs to restyle. Both are assembled on your device. Quality tracks the scan: straight, clean pages recognize well, crooked or washed-out ones benefit from Clean scanned PDF beforehand (run cleanup before OCR, since cleanup rebuilds pages as images). Check names, dates and figures in the .docx against the original — OCR is recognition, not transcription. Nothing is uploaded at any point; the pages are read, recognized and rewritten in your browser.
How it works
- Drop the scan and open OCR — choose the language and the searchable-PDF output
- Send the result on to PDF → Word and pick Faithful layout or Text flow only
- Download the .docx and check names and numbers against the scan
Questions people ask
Why does PDF to Word give me a blank file from my scan?
Because there is nothing to convert. A scan stores pixels, not characters, and a text-flow converter can only reproduce the text layer a PDF contains. Bindery detects image-only pages and tells you to run OCR first rather than handing you an empty document.
How accurate is OCR in the browser?
It is the same Tesseract engine used on servers, running on your device. On clean, straight scans of printed text it is very good; on faxes, handwriting, skewed pages or tiny type it makes mistakes. Bindery cannot check the result for you, so read the important figures against the original.
Will the Word file look like the scanned page?
In Faithful layout mode, close: page size, margins, headings, emphasis, tables and images are reconstructed from the recognized text’s positions. It is still a rebuild rather than a picture, so expect small differences — that is what makes it editable rather than a frozen image.