How to OCR a scanned PDF
Scanned documents are just images — OCR reads the text so you can edit and search it. Here is how to do it free.
What is OCR?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) looks at the picture of a page and works out the actual letters and words. A2Z PDF uses OCR to turn a scanned PDF into an editable Word document, keeping the original layout as closely as possible.
Steps
1. Open the OCR: Scan to Word tool.
2. Choose your scanned PDF.
3. Click Convert and wait — OCR is CPU-heavy, so it can take a little while, especially the first time.
4. Download the editable .docx result.
Getting the best results
Clear, straight, high-contrast scans read best. Faint or skewed scans may lose a few characters. For large documents or faster results, the free desktop app runs OCR on your own machine.