What is a "Searchable" File?

FileCenter Professional's built-in search feature can search documents which contain actual text. For example, a Word document contains actual text. A scanned TIFF image, on the other hand, doesn't. Even though the scanned image seems to contain words, as far as your computer is concerned it is just a picture.

As a rule of thumb, if you can copy text out of a file it's searchable.

Is a PDF Searchable?

A PDF file may or may not be searchable. If the PDF is a scanned image, it will only be searchable if 1) Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been performed on the scanned image and 2) the text which was found is embedded into the PDF.

When you scan using FileCenter, OCR is performed by default. So unless you've changed the default settings, PDF scans done in FileCenter are searchable.

If you scan using a different scanning program and save to PDF, the PDF may or may not be searchable.

If you print a document to the FileCenter PDF print driver, the document will NOT be searchable if it is a scan. The FileCenter PDF print driver does not perform Optical Character Recognition. It will be searchable if the file you're printing has text that you can edit or copy.

Note that even if a document is not full-text searchable, you can still do a filename search.