Choose searchable PDF when page appearance matters
A searchable-PDF workflow keeps the scanned page as the visual reference while adding a text layer for search and copying. That is useful for archives and documents that should continue to look like the original scan.
Choose OCR text when raw words matter most
A TXT export is lighter and easier to move into an editor or another system, but it does not preserve page layout or visual positioning. Use it when the words matter more than the original design.
Both outputs still need review
Both the searchable layer and a text export come from probabilistic optical recognition. Check names, numbers, and dates carefully; successful search does not prove that every recognized character is correct.
Test a difficult page before a long run
Pick a page with small text, numbers, or a table and test it first. If recognition is acceptable on the difficult page, you have a better signal before committing to a long multi-page OCR job.
Choose the output based on what happens after OCR
If the purpose is archiving a scanned document while preserving its original visual appearance, a searchable PDF is usually the clearer choice. If the next step is editing, indexing, importing into another system, or running text analysis, plain OCR text may be simpler. The right answer depends on the downstream task, not on which format sounds more advanced.
Measure recognition quality on content that resembles the real document
OCR accuracy changes with language, resolution, skew, tables, handwriting, and scan quality. Test names, dates, numbers, and dense paragraphs from the actual material and compare the recognized text with the page image. When errors are frequent, improve the source or split the workflow before processing hundreds of pages that would later require expensive manual review.