What OCR does
Optical character recognition estimates text from an image of a page. A searchable PDF can keep the scanned appearance while adding a recognized text layer. The visible page and the hidden text are not the same thing, so a scan that looks correct may still copy or search incorrectly.
Prepare a clearer source
Use upright pages with readable characters and even lighting. Cropping out large borders can help keep attention on the document. Blurred text, handwriting, stamps across letters and complex page layouts make recognition harder. Rescanning a poor source can be more useful than repeatedly processing it.
Check critical details
Search for a phrase you can see on the page, then copy a short passage into a plain text editor. Review names, dates, identifiers and numerical values carefully. Characters such as zero and capital O can be confused. Do not rely on OCR alone for a document where a transcription error has important consequences.
Availability in Folio
OCR PDF is coming soon. PDF to Text is already available, but it reads an existing text layer and does not recognize words from pictures. If your scanned PDF was previously processed with OCR, PDF to Text may extract that existing layer; compare it against the visible scan.
Explore the tools available today
This feature is in development. Merge, split, compress, extract text or turn an image into a PDF now.
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