Scanned or photo-only reports: what to do

How to tell in five seconds

Open the PDF and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If the text highlights, the document has a text layer. If you only get a blue box over the whole page, you have a scan — an image of a document rather than the document.

Why it matters

Analysis of a scan depends on optical character recognition, which introduces errors precisely where accuracy matters most: numbers, page references, and the difference between “no deficiencies noted” and “deficiencies noted”. We would rather tell you we cannot read a document than give you a plan built on a misread of it.

Getting a text-layer copy

Ask your inspector to re-send the original export. Nearly all inspection software produces a text-layer PDF by default, and a scan usually means someone printed and rescanned it somewhere along the chain. The original is normally still in their system and costs them nothing to resend.

If the report genuinely only exists on paper — common with older reports — a scan-to-PDF app with OCR enabled will produce something workable, but check a few page numbers by hand before trusting it.