A scanned PDF is just a picture of a page. As far as your computer is concerned there's no text in it at all, unless something actually reads the picture. If nothing does, whatever is on that page won't come up in a search and won't make it into your evidence file.
When I converted the documents I'd collected for my own case into text, close to half of the PDFs were scans like this. Pretty much anything that had been printed and scanned at some point.
CaseRelief reads these now. As of today, when a PDF attachment is a scan, CaseRelief turns each page into an image and runs it through the text recognition that's built into Windows, then puts the text into your evidence file under that attachment. Image attachments, like a photo of a document, get the same treatment. It all happens on your computer. Nothing gets uploaded.
Fillable forms are worth a second look with any software. A lot of court forms are PDFs with boxes you type into, and programs that pull text out of PDFs will often read the printed part of the form, all the labels and blank lines, and skip whatever was typed into the boxes. I've run into that with my own documents.
So for anything you're going to lean on, open the original and compare it to what's in your evidence file. Forms especially. If something comes out looking like a blank form, go with the page.
If CaseRelief can't get any text out of an attachment at all, it says so right in the evidence file with a note about why, so you always know.
Reading scans is in the free version and it's staying there. I don't want anyone stuck unable to read their own evidence.
– M