Do I get a searchable PDF with an invisible text layer?

Yes, with Searchable PDF. Every page keeps its original look, and the words Tesseract recognised sit invisibly on top in the same place, so a reader's search finds them and you can select and copy them. The layer is only as good as the recognition: a word read wrongly is found under the wrong spelling. A page that could not be recognised is kept without a layer.

Why is the recognition wrong on my document?

The usual causes are a mismatched language setting, a low-resolution scan and heavy skew from a photograph taken at an angle. The tool does not straighten or clean up pages, so rescanning straight and flat helps more than any setting here.

Can it read handwriting?

No. The engine is trained on printed type and will produce unreliable output from cursive or block capitals written by hand. Treat handwritten pages as images and index them some other way.

OCR PDF | Cine Power Planner

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About OCR PDF

OCR reads the pixels of a scanned or photographed PDF and turns them into text you can copy, search and reuse. Each page is rendered in the browser and read by Tesseract, an open-source recognition engine, and the result comes back either as a plain-text file with one section per page or as a searchable copy of your PDF.

Pages are rendered and recognised inside your browser, and neither the scan nor the recognised text is sent to a server. The recognition engine and the data of the chosen language are downloaded from this app's own server the first time you use them and kept for offline use; nothing comes from a third-party CDN.

How to use OCR PDF

Upload a scanned PDF. Every page is recognised, including pages that already contain real text.
Pick the document's language from the Language list — English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Simplified or Traditional) or Arabic. The iPhone, iPad and Android apps offer English and German. A wrong choice is the usual reason results look like noise.
Set Output Format: Plain Text (.txt) gives you the recognised text on its own. Searchable PDF gives you your original pages, unchanged to the eye, with the recognised words laid invisibly over them, so you can search and select text in any PDF reader.
Click Run OCR. Progress is reported page by page; then download the result, or use Change settings to try another language.

On a production

Location agreements and equipment hire notes come back from set as photographs of paper. Six months later somebody needs the one that mentions a particular address, and there is no way to search forty scanned images. Keeping the recognised text next to each scan makes the archive findable without retyping a single page.

Frequently asked questions

Do I get a searchable PDF with an invisible text layer?: Yes, with Searchable PDF. Every page keeps its original look, and the words Tesseract recognised sit invisibly on top in the same place, so a reader's search finds them and you can select and copy them. The layer is only as good as the recognition: a word read wrongly is found under the wrong spelling. A page that could not be recognised is kept without a layer.
Why is the recognition wrong on my document?: The usual causes are a mismatched language setting, a low-resolution scan and heavy skew from a photograph taken at an angle. The tool does not straighten or clean up pages, so rescanning straight and flat helps more than any setting here.
Can it read handwriting?: No. The engine is trained on printed type and will produce unreliable output from cursive or block capitals written by hand. Treat handwritten pages as images and index them some other way.