What is OCR?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology uses to recognize text in scanned PDFs or images and turn it into real, editable text. Instead of being stuck with flat images, you can search, copy, and edit the content just like a normal PDF.

PDFgear offers two main OCR options depending on your needs:

Make a Scanned PDF Searchable

With this option, PDFgear runs OCR directly on your scanned PDF. The file looks the same, but the text becomes selectable and editable. You can:

• Search for words or phrases
• Highlight and copy text
• Edit the content directly in the PDF editor

This is the best choice if you want to keep working inside the PDF itself.

Extract Text from a Scanned PDF

Sometimes you don’t need to edit the PDF, but you just want to grab the text inside. PDFgear also supports running OCR to extract the recognized text as plain content. You can do this for the entire document or for specific regions you select.

• Quickly copy the text
• Save or export it into another file
• Reuse the content without retyping

This is the ideal option when you simply want to reuse text from a scanned document.