What is OCR software for PDF? Explained

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

With optical character recognition (OCR) technology, OCR software automatically extracts text from any scanned PDF or image file and OCR converts it to a searchable PDF file. With OCR software, you can transform a scanned PDF of a paper document into a text-searchable PDF document. This new OCR searchable PDF is like an image containing text data, that you will be able to search for a specific keyword. When we read a document, our brain recognizes a character by analyzing the patterns and compare them against the pre-learned alphabet set. An OCR software application is trying to do the exact same. An OCR software reads the text pixels from a scanned image and compares it against a pre-trained dataset. Once the text is recognized, it is added as a hidden layer in the scanned PDF. This new "sandwiched PDF" file is popularly known as a searchable PDF.