


Essentially, it recognizes and extracts text from images. OCR software is necessary to electronically recognize each character on a page and then transform it into a usable format to search or edit a scanned PDF. As a result, a "scanned" PDF document is produced.Ī scanned PDF's content cannot be searched or modified. The software provided with the scanner then converts the photo into a PDF document. It only takes a "snapshot" of the paper document. When a scanner makes this scanned image, it does not replicate each character of every word.

This is performed by selecting a scanner or a similar machine that captures an image of a paper document and saves it as an electronic PDF file. What is a Scanned PDF?Ī PDF document can be created by scanning a paper document into an electronic version. There are a few different ways to do this, but in this article, we'll show you the most effective and convenient ways to convert scanned PDFs to Word on Windows and Mac. Once you've processed your document using OCR, you can proceed to convert the PDF into a Word file. How do you convert a scanned PDF to Word format to make it editable in Microsoft software? Converting a scanned or non-editable PDF file requires a special process called OCR or optical character recognition.
