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Understanding document searchability levels

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The searchability status of a document describes how indexable the document is. It is classified in the following 3 categories:

  1. Fully Searchable

    A PDF document is fully searchable if all its pages have text that can indexed and searched.

  2. Partially Searchable

    A partially searchable document contains some pages with text, others with only images or no images and no text (blank)

  3. Image-only

    This is a PDF that has been created from one or more images – most commonly because of scanning a document either directly to PDF or by converting a scanned TIFF image to PDF.  These files do not contain any searchable text and most often comprise a set of Group4 or JBIG2 images in a PDF “wrapper”.

    Image documents (TIFF, BMP, JPG and PNG) are always identified as image-only.