I’ve got a scanned contract from a notary that’s basically just photos of each page, so when I try to search or copy text it does nothing. My laptop is a school-issued Windows machine and I can’t install new programs on it, so I’m wondering whether any reader can deal with image-only pages or if I’m stuck.
Honestly, the simplest fix is uploading it to Google Drive and openning it with Google Docs. It runs OCR automatically on image pages so you can copy whatever text you need, which saves me constantly with scanned vendor contracts.
That is annoying, but the PDF reader is not the real issue: image-only pages need OCR first. On a school Windows laptop, I would try an approved browser-based OCR tool or OneNote’s “Copy Text from Picture” feature, then save the searchable copy; avoid uploading the contract anywhere unless its privacy policy and your school permit it.