What OCR actually does
Optical Character Recognition analyzes pixel patterns and adds an invisible text layer beneath your scan. The page looks the same but becomes searchable, selectable, and convertible to Word or Excel.
Layout fidelity depends on scan quality
300 DPI clean scans outperform phone photos with shadows. Straighten pages with Rotate PDF and crop borders with Crop PDF before running OCR PDF.
Language and mixed scripts
Select the primary document language on the configure step. Mixed English and Arabic forms need the dominant language first — review output and re-run with corrected settings if glyphs misrecognize.
After OCR: conversion paths
- PDF to Word for editable prose
- PDF to Excel for tabular statements
- Compress PDF before email once text layer is added
Quality checklist before archiving
Search for a rare word, copy a paragraph into Notepad, and spot-check numbers in tables. For long-term retention, follow with PDF to PDF/A if your records policy requires archival format.