What's OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?

OCR is known as Optical Character Recognition. It's the technology to convert scanned PDF or image PDF to editable text so you can edit, copy and search the recognized text.

What can OCR do for you?

OCR is the universal technology to convert documents like scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into editable and searchable text. In many libraries and offices, millions of books and documents are scanned regularly for backup or archive purpose. A scanner only takes photographs of the original paper documents, resulting in image-based documents in PDF format. This results in failure  to search for a phrase, name or any text inside a file. Worse, you can't make any changes to the document. You can't highlight, copy, or modify file, since the document just contains images, instead of individual text characters. The below image shows the differences between a scanned PDF and standard PDF. 

Before OCR processing, the whole page is highlighted and no text can be edited or searched.

After processed by an OCR tool, the PDF texts can be selected with selecting tools. You're able to search and edit characters, words, and paragraphs effortlessly.