Convert scanned documents into text (OCR)

Optical character recognition (OCR) is an intelligent text recognition technology that lets you extract text from any scanned paper document or image file. Once a scan or an image goes through the OCR processing, it’s easy to annotate the text and search through the document using handy PDF Expert 3 tools. Follow the article to become a power user of this feature.

OCR is available in PDF Expert for Mac 3.0. or later. As for the iOS version, our team is already working on adding this functionality as soon as possible. 

1. Open a PDF file containing a scanned image in PDF Expert for Mac and select the Scan & OCR tab.
2. If needed, enhance the scan and adjust it to your needs by setting a custom page size, unifying the paper format, and filling page margins with color. Check out this article to learn more about these options.
3. Click Recognize Text to enter a preview mode:

• Orange frames highlight possible OCR typos in the text. Click the frame to compare the actual picture with the recognized text. If there is a typo, edit the text and select Correct. To quickly navigate through highlighted text, use the navigation buttons.
• PDF Expert automatically detects the main language of the document. If the language was not detected correctly, you can change it or add more in the corresponding menu on the right.

4. Click the blue Recognize button on the right to apply OCR. If there is more than one page, set the pages you'd like to process and click Apply.
5. If you need to copy the recognized text, please switch to another tab (Annotate or Export), select the text > right-click > Copy, or select the text and press Command-C.

Once the Text Recognition is applied, you can easily annotate the document or export it in the desired format. To do so, simply switch from the Scan & OCR tab to the needed one. 

To search through the document, click the search field and type the word or phrase you are looking for. Click any item in the list of search results to jump to the needed place in the document. To hide the list of search results, click the cross sign in the search field.

If you’re experiencing any issues with the Text Recognition feature in PDF Expert, please make sure you have the app version 3.0. or later installed. Then try to quit the app and launch it again. If the situation hasn’t been resolved, please contact our support team at rdsupport@readdle.com. In your message, describe the issue and we will keep in touch to help.