fixtdoc

Glossary / OCR

What Is OCR? (Optical Character Recognition)

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology that converts images of text, such as scanned documents, photographs of pages, or image-only PDFs, into machine-readable, searchable, and editable text.

How OCR works

OCR software analyzes the shapes and patterns in an image to identify individual characters. Modern OCR engines use machine learning and neural networks to achieve high accuracy, even with unusual fonts, skewed text, or low-resolution scans. The recognized text is then embedded in the file as a searchable text layer.

When applied to PDFs, OCR creates a "sandwich" PDF: the original scanned image remains visible, while an invisible text layer sits on top, enabling copy/paste, full-text search, and screen reader accessibility.

Why OCR matters

Without OCR, scanned documents are essentially images, you cannot search, select, or copy text from them. OCR makes archives searchable, enables document indexing, and is essential for accessibility compliance under guidelines like WCAG.

Related tools on fixtdoc