Best Online Tool for PDF OCR

OCR stands for optical character recognition. This is the process of "translating" text within an image into text that a digital device or program recognizes. You may have noticed that when you scan a document, you can't edit the text that it contains; that's because the program views it as an image and not text. Learn more about how an OCR interprets the text that the scanned document contains.

OCRs detect patterns in the text to identify the letters, characters, and numbers. You'll find that OCR technology works better with printed text that you've scanned in a high resolution. It may struggle with handwriting that has differently shaped letters or low-resolution images that have illegible text.

Optical character recognition is usually very fast with modern machine-learning capabilities. You may have the result of a page in just a few seconds. Tens of pages or more may take longer to fully convert to documents. Conversions depend on size, quality and your internet connections.

An OCR's biggest limitations will come down to the file you're working with. The file needs to be in the right format, such as a PDF. The quality of the OCR conversion will be limited by the resolution or image quality of the original file. The OCR may struggle with documents that have smaller text. Additionally, OCRs are typically set up to work with specific languages. If you're scanning a high-resolution document with printed text, you're unlikely to have problems with PDF.Live's OCR.

Scanned PDFs were created using a scanner, converting a physical document to an electronic variant. A native PDF was created digitally with a print-to-PDF tool like PDF.Live's Doc to PDF converter. Unlike scanned PDFs, native PDFs have metadata that contains information about the fonts and characters that the document used. Because of this, native PDFs may already have their text freely editable using a PDF editor. A scanned PDF will have to be converted using an OCR for you to edit the text it contains.

PDF.Live's OCR tool, and all other powerful PDF management and conversion tools, are free to try with a PDF.Live free trial. PDF.Live makes it easy to work with PDFs, no matter the size of your organization. If you've scanned documents that you need to edit, our OCR tool makes this workflow easy with PDF tools that work directly in your web browser. PDF.Live offers a range of different payment plans, depending on your needs.