What is OCR software?
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. This is a type of software or tool that can determine non-editable text from an image or PDF file, extract the text and convert it into a machine-readable format.
It’s used across a variety of industries and settings. Thanks to its text recognition technology, you can turn static images or scanned documents into fully functioning text that you can search, copy, highlight and even edit.
How to use OCR software to edit text in a PDF
Adobe’s free online OCR software can help you find, copy and edit PDF text in a flash. Here’s how to do it.
- Drag and drop your PDF into the grey-dotted drop box or click the Select a file button underneath.
- Choose a PDF document that you want to scan with OCR, so that you can easily search, edit 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
Instant optical character recognition
Make manual data entry a thing of the past. With optical character recognition (OCR), Acrobat works as a text converter, automatically extracting text from any scanned paper document or image file and converting it to editable text in a PDF.
Make PDF text easy to search
OCR lets Adobe Acrobat use text recognition to search for words or key phrases in your documents, saving you time and effort. Optical character recognition also allows you to use screen readers, greatly increasing accessibility.
Preserves your fonts and formatting
Rest easy knowing Acrobat can recognise text and its formatting to retain the exact look and feel of your documents. Your new PDF will match your original printout thanks to automatic customised font generation.
No need to install extra OCR software
You can access our suite of Adobe Acrobat tools on a variety of browsers. That means no downloads or installs are needed to use our OCR software. You can even work with your new PDF in Office applications. Simply cut and paste or export it to a Microsoft Word (DOCX) document, PowerPoint file (PPT), Excel spreadsheet (XLS) or a plain text document (TXT).
Trusted security and privacy
As creators of the PDF format, you can trust Adobe to keep your files safe and in line with GDPR. 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.
OCR examples and use cases
- Education: If your company has courses as part of training and development, it’s easy to scan textbooks and turn them into searchable resources. This might be useful if you’re a finance firm, for example, when people are taking their accreditation exams.
- Branded assets: Brands can digitise their marketing materials or signage to turn print assets into editable formats. They can then be repurposed into social campaigns or digital promotions.
- Sharing creative ideas: For designers and creatives, OCR scanners make it easy to extract text from mood board clippings or scanned sketches and convert it into editable copy for presentations and social content.
- Book digitisation: Perhaps your company has old publications, magazines, publications or books – make them digital so you can easily search through them.
- Data extraction: OCR can pull invoice data into spreadsheets, perfect for monitoring finances or inventory tracking.
- Quick translation: Snap a photo of a foreign-language menu or sign, run OCR, and then paste the result into a translation tool. Perfect if you work with international clients or departments.
- Legal/compliance: Lawyers can digitise contracts or government documents using an OCR text scanner for archiving, full-text search or editing.
Questions? We have answers.
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.
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 of OCR. Crucially, though, it’s able to read different languages, fonts, sizes and styles – including hand-written notes. While it’s similar to OCR, it uses more advanced algorithms and is generally more intelligent.
Read more about the differences between OCR and ICR.
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