A scanned page is just a picture. You can read it, but you can't select, copy or search the words. OCR, short for optical character recognition, reads the picture and gives you the text.
Step by step
- Open the OCR tool and choose a scanned PDF or an image such as a photo of a page.
- The tool shows its progress: it renders each page, then recognises the text one page at a time.
- The text appears in a box as it's found. For several pages, each is marked with a heading like Page 2. Copy it, or click Download .txt to save it.
Get better results
- Use clear, well-lit, high-contrast scans. Black text on a white page works best.
- Keep pages straight and the right way up. Rotate sideways pages first with the Rotate tool.
- Blurry photos, handwriting and unusual fonts will be less accurate, so always check important text.
- For a phone, the Scan to PDF tool's Black & white filter gives the cleanest pages for OCR.
Limits
- English only for now.
- The first time you use it, the tool downloads its language data from a public content network, so it needs an internet connection that once. After that it can read your files without uploading them.
- It gives you text, not a searchable PDF. The original scan isn't changed.