Importance of OCR when you work with PDFs

Different types of PDFs are there that doesn’t allow you to do what you actually want, for instance, selecting text for copying it or finding a word in PDF by searching. Making use of right tools can solve this problem. This is where importance of OCR is realized. 

Reasons why PDFs work differently

You can categorise the PDF documents into three types based on how it is created. This defines whether you can access the content or not. Understanding the structure is quite easy if you consider it as different layers. The topmost layer is an image and to access text, there should be a text layer under the aforesaid image layer.
 
Types of PDFs- main features
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• Digitally created PDFs

It is created with software like MS Word, Excel or by using “print” function in software applications. Both images are texts are present. Such documents are searchable. You can assess the content to reuse or annotate. 

• Scanned PDFs

As the name itself suggests these are created when you scan paper documents and also on converting an image into portable document format. Only an image layer is present which makes the document non-searchable and hence no content can be accessed. 

• Searchable Scanned PDFs

They are created by applying OCR to image based or scanned PDFs. Here, a text layered is additionally added and it is made searchable with the help of optical character recognition. Though with certain limitations, you can access the content. 

What is OCR and how it works?

Scanners create portable document format documents but they just provide a snapshot or image of the concerned document. It is in fact only some coloured or black and white dots called raster image without any data. For extracting and reusing the data from such scanned or image only documents, an OCR software or a PDF tool integrated with OCR is needed. They recognize letters in images, put them as words and finally arrange them into sentences. After this process, accessing and editing content is made possible.

In short, OCR unlocks information trapped in a scanned content. It reads content from a document by comprehending images of characters and assigning them appropriate text equivalents. 

How OCR is a boon for you?

With OCR, image only scanned documents can turn out to be highly useful for you. Content can be easily managed, copied and indexed. Also the whole document is searchable. More productivity is ensured because.
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• Image only or scanned documents can be dealt with just as if you are dealing with digitally made PDFs. 
• While collaborating, selection of text can be done for highlighting, commenting and making annotations. 
• Information can be assessed easily and swiftly. 
• Confidential information can be safeguarded using ‘Search and Redact” option. 
• Information can be reused without retyping it manually.
• You don’t have to struggle with portable document format files any more. 

Also read about how OCR conversion benefits for business.
Digital conversion companies offering professional OCR conversion services can be of great help.