PDF OCR

PDF OCR can help you recognize the text in scanned PDF documents. Moreover, it can create new PDFs from a series of images.

The application has an easy-to-use interface. When you start it, you will be prompted to choose between two modes: scanned image to PDF or scanned PDF to text. Unfortunately, once you enter one of these modes, you cannot switch to the other unless you restart the program.

When creating a PDF, you can use multiple image formats, such as JPG, TIFF, GIF and PNG. Then, each image will correspond to a different page in the resulting document and you can arrange them in the desired order. Additionally, you can provide information about the document, including title, author, subject and keywords. Unfortunately, the application cannot take the images directly from a scanner. What is worse, it cannot recognize the text within the scanned images.

Making a scanned PDF’s text editable is very easy. It will only require loading the desired document and pressing the OCR button. Before actually processing the text, the program will prompt you to provide the language of the source text. It is a pity that the resulting text contained lots of mistakes, even when the input file was rather clear.

In general, PDF OCR is a useful and straightforward application. However, it still has a long way to go before it becomes a faultless product.