OCR – Optical Character Recognition – is a tool that can determine text from an image and turn it into a machine-readable format. Thanks to its ability to recognise text, you can turn static images into fully-functioning text that you can search for, copy, highlight and even edit.

Acrobat online OCR tech is totally free. Just drag your PDF file into the dropzone above to create a searchable PDF using optical character recognition. There are no subscriptions, downloads or hidden costs involved. After a few sessions, you may need to register for an Adobe account, but this is completely free.

OCR can convert any static PDF image into scannable text. To check if it's worked, simply try searching for a phrase in the document. Try our Adobe Acrobat Pro seven-day free trial to use Adobe OCR technology in other image file types, including JPG, TIFF, and PNG files.

Our Acrobat Pro free trial also lets you access other PDF editing features, too. Edit your PDF, increase security with PDF passwords, collect signatures, and convert file types to and from PDF, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.

Acrobat OCR online tool recognises text in a PDF document. You can make text editable, searchable, and selectable from other formats, including image file formats like PNG, JPG, and TIFF, through Adobe Acrobat Pro, on our 7 day free trial.

Using the Acrobat Pro free trial gives you access to advanced PDF features. You'll be able to edit PDF text and images and convert to and from PDF, including converting text files (TXT) and Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents.

Adobe Acrobat OCR text recognition works with English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese and several other languages. For a full list, visit our OCR technology page.

OCR has a number of important benefits – including accuracy, cost effectiveness, and speed. However, OCR can sometimes struggle to recognise more complex text and characters. So, while OCR is an excellent tool, it isn’t always a failsafe one.

ICR, or Intelligent Character Recognition, is a form OCR. Crucially though, it’s able to read different languages, fonts, sizes and styles – including hand-written notes. So, while it’s a bit like OCR, it uses more advanced algorithms and is generally more intelligent. Read more about the differences between OCR and ICR.