Using webPDF and OCR to convert graphic texts into editable PDF documents

Letter cubes spelling TEXT

In the course of business you'll often encounter documents that contain text, but are in a format that computer-based word processing does not support. These sorts of files are mostly images from optical input devices, such as scanners, digital cameras and fax receivers, which are produced in the form of raster graphics. Such texts must first be recognized by OCR before these documents can be efficiently utilized. Once that is done, you can edit, copy and search these texts as you normally do. Automatic character recognition saves valuable time and money.

What is OCR?​

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and describes the information-technology process of recognizing texts and individual characters. The procedure begins by doing an analysis of the entire document and a search through its relevant areas, such as blocks of text. This is followed by the actual character recognition process, which starts by singling out individual lines and then identifying them using pattern matching. The ultimate result of this OCR process is a machine-readable text.

Improve workflows with webPDF and OCR​

webPDF provides a function that allows you to create searchable and editable PDF text documents from image-based text. This eliminates the time-consuming task of manual transcription and the inefficiency of working with image-only text documents.

Workflows in which documents must be identified, processed, and archived quickly and reliably become much more efficient when image-based text is converted into machine-readable text. Because it is centrally deployed, webPDF lets you seamlessly integrate image-based text into your organization's digital data processing. The server-side use of webPDF OCR features makes work, communication, and archiving processes faster, more reliable, and easier to use.

The fact that webPDF also uses web services to automate this OCR function guarantees that this capability can be seamlessly integrated within your company's workflows.