How to make a scanned Malayalam PDF searchable
Open Make searchable, choose Malayalam as the language of the scan, add English if the pages mix the two, and press Make it searchable. The Malayalam words go into the PDF itself, invisibly over each page, so your reader’s find, select and copy work on them.
Make searchableFree. Nothing is uploaded.
How to do it
- Open Make searchable and add the scanned PDF.
- Choose Malayalam under Language of the scan.
- Choose English under Also in if the pages carry English words or names too.
- Press Make it searchable; the Malayalam reader comes from this site the first time only.
- Save the searchable copy and try your reader’s find on a word you can see.
What you get
A copy of your PDF, named with (searchable) at the end, that looks exactly like the scan. Over each scanned page lies an invisible layer of the words that were read, in Malayalam script, lined up with the picture. Search for a name and the reader jumps to it; select a line and copy it into a message, a note or a document. Pages that already had text of their own are left as they were.
Every word read, Malayalam and English alike, goes into the PDF itself rather than into a separate text file, so the file you keep or send is the file that searches.
A scan that reads well
The reader works from a picture of each page, so the picture decides how well it does. Print on clean paper reads far better than a faint photocopy, and a straight page better than a crooked photo. If you are starting from phone photos, put them through Scan first, with Black and white, which straightens the page, whitens the paper and makes the letters crisp. Keep the paper flat, keep your shadow off it, and let it fill the photo.
Malayalam has many joined letters and small vowel signs, and those are the first details a blurred photo loses. If one letter keeps being read as another, a sharper photo of that page helps more than anything else. Handwriting and old typewritten pages read poorly whatever the language.
Checking names and numbers
Everything in the layer was read from a picture, so treat it as a good draft. After saving, search for a name and a number you can see on the page; if they are found, the layer lines up. Then copy a sentence into a note and compare it with the page. That shows how well this scan was read before you rely on it for a survey number, an amount or a date.
If a word you can see is not found, search for part of it. Malayalam letters can be stored inside a computer in more than one way, and a shorter piece of the word often finds it when the whole word does not.
When it says every page already has text
Make searchable leaves alone any page that already has text of its own, which is usually right. But some Malayalam PDFs were typed years ago with older typing software whose letters copy out as a jumble of English letters and symbols, and those pages count as having text. If copying from your file gives nonsense and Make searchable says every page already has text, turn the pages into pictures first: save them with PDF to images as PNG at Print sharpness, make them a PDF again with Images to PDF on A4 with no margin, and make that searchable.
A worked example
Lakshmi has a 12-page scanned bundle of land papers from the village office, partly in Malayalam and partly in English, and needs every mention of a survey number and her grandfather’s name. She opens Make searchable, adds the PDF, chooses Malayalam as the language of the scan and English under Also in, and presses Make it searchable. The first time, the Malayalam reader, about 2.8 MB, comes from this site; then each page is read on her own phone, one at a time. She saves the copy, searches for the survey number, then for her grandfather’s name typed in Malayalam, and checks each match against the page.
Questions people ask
Is my document sent anywhere to be read?
No. The reading happens in your browser, on your device. Only the Malayalam reader itself comes from this site, the first time you pick it; your scan goes nowhere.
Can it read handwritten Malayalam?
Not well. It is made for printed text. Handwriting, and very old typewritten pages, come out with many mistakes.
How long does it take?
Each page is real work for your device, so a long scan takes a while, and longer on an older phone. A line shows which page it is reading.
Can I copy the Malayalam into WhatsApp or Word?
Yes. Select it in your reader and copy, or take the searchable copy to Extract text for all of it as plain text, Malayalam included.
Can I pick Malayalam, English and Tamil together?
Yes, up to three languages. Pick only those really on the pages: each extra one makes the reading slower and mistakes more likely.
What about Hindi and other Indian languages?
Twenty languages can be picked, among them Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. For Hindi, see Hindi OCR for scanned PDFs.
Your file stays on your device. Foolscap does the work inside your browser, so nothing is uploaded and there is nothing for anyone to keep. How you can check