How to recognise text in a PDF using OCR online
Perhaps you want to find and copy some text from a PDF, without having to type it out manually. That’s where Adobe’s free online OCR software comes in:
- Drag and drop your PDF into the grey-dotted drop zone or click the Select a file button at the bottom of the drop zone.
- Choose a PDF document that you want to scan with OCR, so that you can easily search and interact with the text.
- Once the file is uploaded, Adobe Acrobat will use optical character recognition to scan the text in your document.
- Sign in to your Adobe Account to share your PDF or download it.
Try Our Free PDF OCR Online Tool
High-quality optical character recognition
Our online Acrobat OCR tool lets you easily search your text and even highlight any recognised sentences or words.
Make PDF text easy to search
OCR lets Adobe Acrobat use text recognition to search for words or key phrases, saving you time.
Improved accessibility
Optical character recognition lets you use screen readers, greatly increasing accessibility.
No need to install extra OCR software
It may sound complex, but don't worry. You can access our suite of Adobe Acrobat tools on a variety of browsers. That means no downloads or installs to use our OCR software.
Trusted security and privacy
As creators of the PDF format, you can trust Adobe to keep your files safe and in line with GDPR regulations. We use encryption to protect your data, and delete any uploaded OCR text files if you're not signed in.
The best online OCR reader
We've been innovating the PDF format since its inception, which means you can trust the quality of our OCR tools.
Questions? We have answers.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. This is a type of software or tool that can determine text from an image or PDF file and turn it into a machine-readable format.
Thanks to its text recognition technology, you can turn static images into fully functioning text that you can search for, copy, highlight and even edit.
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 on 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.
Yes, you can recognise text in files that aren’t PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Pro. With a 7-day free trial, you can use OCR on image formats like PNG, JPG, and TIFF.
The trial also unlocks advanced PDF features, including editing and converting to/from PDF, TXT, Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
Optical character recognition has several important benefits, including:
- Accuracy
- Cost effectiveness
- Speed.
However, OCR PDF text recognition can sometimes struggle to identify 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.
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