OCR Unveiled: What is OCR and How to Use OCR for PDFs

Text extraction has been greatly advanced today. Say goodbye to manually inputting content, you can now recognize and grab text from various types of files with OCR.

You may have come across this term many times, especially when scanning a picture with phones or copying paper with printers. But what is exactly OCR? What can it bring to our daily life?

Keep reading – this article will provide you with a deep insight into this breakthrough technology.

A Quick Look at OCR

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, which functions as a digital duplicator for scanning the content from printed or digital documents and converting it to machine-readable files. It’s utilized to recognize and grab text or images from scanned PDFs, so you can save the pictures as text for further editions.

Why You Need OCR for Scanned PDFs

Digital documents have become ubiquitous in the paperless office era. Whether dealing with research papers, legal contracts, or journals, you’ll regularly encounter scanned PDF files.

To make these scanned PDFs easier to read or organize, transforming them into searchable ones is demanded. Well, OCR frees you from the time-consuming manual content transcription.

It directly extracts the text from the image-based PDFs, making the files editable for sharing or content change.

Decoding the Workings of OCR

The workflow of OCR software is as follows:

• Transforming the scanned document into a two-color sort.
• Scrutinizing the scanned image, identifying bright areas as the background and dark areas as characters.
• Preprocessing the PDF for reading by removing errors, cleaning up spots, tidying up lines, etc.
• Separating the characters or glyphs in the text and comparing them with the glyphs that have been stored in a similar font and size
• Taking apart the letters into different parts, like lines and loops. Use these features to find the letter that looks the most similar in the saved glyphs.
• Transforming the obtained text data into a digital file.

Best 4 OCR Software for Scanned PDFs

There are many PDF software options available that come equipped with OCR, and it’s crucial to select a handy one for your document tasks.

Here below are the top 4 OCR software that can deal with scanned PDFs effectively. Read on to make a quick pick.

PDFgear

PDFgear performs as a powerful PDF software with comprehensive features. It provides 100% free services while requiring no subscription to download.

The OCR it uses can tackle multi-language and different types of file conversion. You can implement a high-quality PDF-to-Word conversion for large files or complete batch conversion with a click. The output file is maintained in the original format without content loss.

To make content extracting simpler, it also enables OCR certain parts of the file for you to obtain and copy the text directly.

Adobe Acrobat Pro

Adobe Acrobat Pro is one of the most professional PDF solutions for OCR files. It can quickly recognize the text in the image-based file and convert it into fully editable content.

The original formatting is maintained during the conversion and the various customization options allow a more flexible and specific file conversion.

A monthly subscription is required to access this software. You shall pay nearly $20/month to enjoy its high-standard OCR services.

ABBYY FineReader PDF

ABBYY FineReader PDF is a handy helper for challenging scanned PDF tasks. It adopts three basic principles (integrity, purposefulness, and adaptability) to make file recognition more advanced and animal-like.

Apart from the general OCR functions, ABBYY FineReader PDF offers dictionary support for 48 different languages, enabling a more accurate text analysis.

FineReader PDF is available for both individuals and entrepreneurs. While the AI-based OCR version offers enhanced features, it carries a steep cost of $99 per year.

Foxit PDF Editor

Foxit PDF Editor is a feature-rich file toolkit, which provides an accurate scanner to make a PDF searchable or editable.

The interface of this software is easy for you to navigate and the Quick Recognition feature it provides can speed up all-page recognition with default or previous settings.

Foxit PDF Editor also supports various languages in recognition, ensuring accurate identification of the text if you’re dealing with files in other languages.

All the software above provides sophisticated OCR features. If you’re seeking the best value for your money, don’t overlook the free PDFgear. It excels in handling a variety of tasks related to scanned PDF conversion or recognition while being user-friendly.

Easily Utilize OCR for Scanned PDF Files

The utilization of OCR is pretty simple with PDFgear. You can convert a PDF to another file format online or by software. Both the two methods are for free and with no limitation.

Convert PDFs to Word online with PDFgear OCR

PDFgear now provides 21 types of OCR converters including PDF to Word, PDF to PPT, PDF to JPG, and so on. To transform a PDF to Word, for example, you can:

Head to PDFgear online PDF converter > Choose the file to convert > Download the converted file to your device.

OCR a PDF using PDFgear for Free

Download and launch PDFgear > Open a file.

Tools > Convert > PDF to Word.

Check the OCR box.

Choose the document language.

Hit the Convert button.

For certain text extraction from a scanned PDF, open the file in PDFgear.

Home > OCR > Select text for OCR > Click the done button.

Conclusion

OCR has greatly facilitated file sharing, editing, and converting for business and education. And for scanned documents, this technology has even made text recognition and searching no longer a challenge.

This post gave a deeper insight into OCR, explaining its workings and applications, and introduced some reliable OCR software for scanning PDF files.

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