What is Optical Character Recognition (OCR)?
When you scan a paper document or take a photo of a book page with your smartphone, the resulting PDF contains only a flat bitmap image—computers see it as a collection of pixels rather than editable words. OCR technology analyzes pixel luminance patterns to identify individual character contours, lines, paragraphs, and tables, converting them into machine-encoded Unicode text.
When Should You Use OCR?
- Digitizing historical archives, receipts, and invoices.
- Making research papers and textbooks searchable using
Ctrl + F. - Copying text out of locked or flattened graphic PDF brochures.
Extract text from scanned files in seconds
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