WalkingPDF

checker

Pages no search can reach

A page with no text layer is a picture. It opens, it prints, it looks correct - and no keyword search in any review platform will ever return it. A production where some pages are searchable and some are not is worse than one where none are, because the reviewer has no reason to suspect the gap.

What a reviewer loses

Every search a litigation team runs - a name, an account number, a date - is a search of the text layer. A page without one is not ranked low; it is absent. The document can be the most important one in the set and it will not appear in a single result list. The failure is discovered by the other side, in a deposition, when a document everybody assumed had been searched turns out never to have been reachable.

Three states, three different answers

A presence test catches the first and misses the other two, which is why the check measures a proportion and a character count rather than asking whether the page has any text at all.

  • **No page has text.** The whole file is an image-only scan. This is obvious the first time anyone searches it.
  • **Some pages have text and some do not.** The dangerous one. The set behaves as if it is searchable, and the unsearchable pages are silently excluded from every result.
  • **The text is there but empty of meaning.** A page whose only extractable characters are the Bates stamp, or a layer of glyphs that failed to encode, passes a naive "has text" test and fails the reader.

What the check reports

Pages with no text layer at all are named. Pages carrying only the stamp are separated from pages carrying a real, if thin, layer, because the fix is different: the first was never OCRed, the second was OCRed badly. Glyphs that failed to encode are counted as replacement characters and reported separately again, because a text layer full of them is present and useless.

Check this set for it now

Upload the PDFs you are about to serve, plus the DAT and OPT if you have them, or one ZIP of the folder. The verdict, the file list and the worst findings are free. You pay only if you want the certificate, the report and the findings CSV to hand to somebody else.

The verdict, the file list and the worst findings are free and stay free. The certificate, report, findings CSV, manifest and deficiency report unlock on payment, from $49 for a set up to 1,000 pages. The three sizes.

Frequently asked questions

Is a production without OCR automatically deficient?

Not automatically - some protocols accept image-only productions, and a scanned exhibit can be legitimately unsearchable. It becomes a deficiency when the protocol requires searchable text, or when the producing party has described the production as searchable. The check reports the fact; whether it is a breach is a question for the protocol.

Can the check tell me whether the OCR is accurate?

No, and no tool can without the source document. It reports pages with no layer, pages whose layer holds only the stamp, pages with a thin layer, and glyphs that failed to encode. Whether the recognised words are the right words is a judgement made by reading the page.

Does it run on the free check?

Yes - text presence is one of the checks the free single-PDF check runs, and it is the fastest way to find out whether one file is searchable before uploading a whole production.

Keep reading

hub What we check, and what each check means Seventy checks run against a production. Each one is a deterministic read of the files - the stamps on the pages, the structure of the PDF, the rows of the load file - and each returns a pass, a warning or a blocker with the file and page it came from. Nothing here is a model's opinion, and nothing here is claimed on the certificate unless it actually ran. guide Making a scanned production searchable A scanned page without a text layer still displays, prints and numbers correctly - it is simply invisible to search, to highlighting and to every review platform's analytics. Finding those pages before service is cheap; finding them after is a supplemental production. This page covers how the text layer is detected, what OCR has to achieve, and why the audit reports the gap rather than filling it. guide How to QC an incoming production A production you receive has to load, read and reconcile before anyone can review it. These twelve checks run in the order that surfaces the expensive failures first: does the load file import, does every row have an image, does the numbering hold, and is every page searchable. Run them before the review clock starts, not after. tool Check a PDF for production defects Upload one PDF and get a plain-language result for each production check: text layer, Bates gaps, duplicate Bates numbers, extractable stamp text, page size and rotation drift, redaction leakage, and whether the file opens at all. No account or email address is needed, and the uploaded file is checked in a temporary directory and discarded. checker A Bates number that appears twice A duplicate Bates number means two pages answer to the same citation. In a review platform the second one overwrites or collides with the first; on paper, a request to "turn to ABC000418" has two answers. It is one of the few production defects that is always wrong, because there is no protocol in which two pages may share a number. checker The stamp prints over the words A stamp placed on top of body text makes the words it covers unreadable in the copy that gets served, and a stamp placed too close to the paper edge is cropped by the printer or the scanner. Neither changes the file's numbering, so neither is caught by counting anything - it is a check of where the glyphs actually sit.