Why you cannot click the text in a scanned PDF
A scanner, a phone camera, a fax, or a design exported flat from Canva or Illustrator all give the same thing: one picture per page and no text at all. That is why ordinary PDF editors show nothing to edit.
Overtype runs OCR (optical character recognition) inside your browser. It finds each line of words and where it sits on the page, and turns it into a line you can click and retype — like any other PDF.
How to edit a scanned PDF
- Open the PDF. When a page has no text, the editor offers to read it.
- Choose the language — Albanian, English, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and more — so accents and letters are read correctly.
- Click a line and type. The new words are painted over the page's own background colour.
- Missed a line? Pick Read area and drag a box around it.
- Save.
What to expect
- On a scan the old words are covered, not deleted — they are pixels in a picture. The save report says so.
- There is no embedded font in a scan, so you pick the closest typeface; size and colour are matched from the page.
- OCR runs on your device. The first read downloads the language data once; the scan itself is never uploaded.
After OCR you can also translate the scanned document line by line.
Questions
Can I edit text in a scanned PDF for free?
Yes. OCR and editing are free and run in your browser.
Does OCR support Albanian?
Yes — Albanian and 20 other languages are offered by name, including ë and ç.
Is the scan uploaded for OCR?
No. Text recognition runs on your own device, inside the browser tab.
Are the old words removed from a scanned page?
They are covered with the page colour, because on a scan they are part of the picture. The save report states this for each line.