I am trying to upload a handwritten document scanned into a pdf.
Its perfectly legible and scannable on other ocr software easily.
however iin chatGPT I get this error.
no matter what model I use. Also I have plus account.
That behavior is expected. ChatGPT only extracts text from PDFs that already contain searchable text. The PDF you uploaded is a scanned handwritten document. Even though it is clearly readable and other OCR software can recognize it, ChatGPT itself does not perform OCR directly on uploaded PDF files. Instead, the PDF must first be processed by the same OCR software you describe, or other that can enhance the PDF.
That OCR software (or OCR that accompanies the scanning solution) adds searchable text to the PDF. Once the PDF has searchable text, ChatGPT can then extract and use it through OpenAI’s file search and vector store system. This limitation applies to all ChatGPT models, even if you have a ChatGPT Plus account, despite the user interface appearance of “attachment”.
However, there is a new feature available through OpenAI’s API and the Responses endpoint. This feature allows you to attach a PDF file directly as part of a message. When you attach a PDF this way, the system automatically extracts text and also visually processes each page. This rendering and placement for GPT-4o vision helps the AI better understand the document. As a result, ChatGPT can handle tasks that were previously difficult with a chunking-search technique, such as summarizing an entire PDF document, even if it was not originally searchable.