What is OCR?

Part 1: About OCR?

1. What is OCR?

OCR, optical character recognition, is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, widely used in the scanned document and photos. This technology arose in 1990s. At that time, people began digitalizing the historic newspaper. Through several improvements, OCR has been accepted in many scenarios.

2. What is OCR Used for?

Generally, OCR is used to convert the printed document to the machine-encoded text. Then, we can edit the text with Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and the other text processors. Ahead of the generation of OCR, people typed the words into the computer. That wasted time and easily caused input errors.

Now, the OCR technology appears when you create, edit and process various document types. For example, the insurance company can improve the input efficiency and the character accuracy via the OCR technology. The financial company uses the OCR technology to speed up manage the bills. The companies can modify contracts together when the documents are converted with OCR. From these examples, we can see that OCR greatly improves our work efficiency.

From the above contents, we’ve learned about what OCR is. Can we use this technology to improve the character recognition for PDF files? Next, we will tell you how to use the OCR software.

Part 2: How to Use OCR-based PDF Converter?

Many PDF applications can convert PDF to the other formats, some of which are not shipped with OCR. These format converters easily get wrong in the process of conversion. To avoid these troubles, we recommend the OCR-based software, Renee PDF Aide.

This software can effectively convert the scanned PDF file to the editable document with the advanced OCR technology. Besides, you can use the software to basically edit the PDF files. The followings are more details.

1. What is Renee PDF Aide?

Renee PDF Aide is the software that supports to edit PDF and convert PDF. With utilization of the advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, it can convert PDF to Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Image/HTML/TXT and the other common formats. You can designate the specific pages to be converted at the speed of 80 pages/min. Besides, it can repair the damaged PDF files, compress PDF files to shorten the loading time, merge several files into one and rotate the file position. En/decryption and watermark are allowed to add for PDF files, too.

What’s more, Renee PDF Aide supports English/French/German/Spanish/Portuguese/Chinese/Korean/Japanese. Under the mode of OCR, it can greatly improve the accuracy of character recognition. Even though you are a new user, you can use this software easily.

2. How to Use Renee PDF Aide?

Renee PDF Aide can not only edit PDF, but also convert PDF to the other formats. Next, we will show you how to convert PDF.

Steps:

Step 1: Download and install Renee PDF Aide. Open the software and select [Convert PDF].

Step 2: Select desired format at the top menu. Then, click on [Add Files] to select the target PDF file. To improve the character recognition, check the option [Enable OCR] to improve the character recognition.

About the OCR function:

The OCR function can improve text recognition in two ways:

A. Recognize words on image and PDF. You can use this function to improve text recognition when you are going to convert the image-based PDF and the scanned PDF.

B. Recognize the font style to avoid garbled codes when there are different embedded font styles on the PDF file.

Tips: If you enable the function [Enable OCR], the characters will be recognized much accurately. We suggest you use the function, but the conversion process will be prolonged.

Step 3: Click on [Convert] to convert the format.

After that, we will learn about how to edit PDF with Renee PDF Aide.

Steps:

Step 1: Download and install Renee PDF Aide. Open the software and get into [PDF Tools].

Step 2: Select the functions at the top menu. Then, click on [Add Files] to select the PDF file.

Instruction of each tool:

Repair: Fix the broken PDF file or the file that cannot be opened

Optimize: Compress large PDF file

Split: Split a PDF file into small files

Merge: Merge several PDF files into one, or merge the selected pages

Rotate: Adjust a PDF file at different angles

En/Decrypt: Lock and unlock PDF files

Watermark: Add overlay watermark or background to PDF files

Image→PDF: Convert one or more images into PDF file(s)

Step 3: Finally, click on [Convert] to save the PDF file.

These are the contents about what OCR is and how to use the OCR-related software. Next time when you convert PDF to the editable formats, you can try Renee PDF Aide. What’s more, it supports you to edit PDF. Let’s have a try!