There are several free and open-source options for performing PDF OCR. We’ll take a look at some of the best.
What is PDF OCR?
A common problem with PDFs created from a scanner is that the pages are essentially images, not text. You can see that by right-clicking on a scanned page in your PDF viewer and selecting “Open Image,” which will display it as an image (or perhaps a bitmap) rather than searchable, selectable, or copyable text.
This is where OCR comes into play. In this case, you’re probably thinking of Optical Character Recognition, but there’s also something called PDF OCR. It detects text within an image or a scanned document and then converts that text into an editable form. This process allows you to copy and highlight the contents.
It’s important to know that OCR technology isn’t perfect. There are some characters that might not be converted correctly. But for most users, the conversion should be sufficient.
In a recent thread on the r/linux Reddit community, members discussed various free PDF OCR tools. The discussion has since been moved to the r/OCR subreddit, where you’ll find additional suggestions beyond what we’ve already described here.
LeedPDF
One of the open-source tools Reddit users point to is LeedPDF. In the r/linux discussion, it’s described as a free, open-source PDF editor that is “almost” a full suite, and recommended as a fast, less buggy option for PDF OCR on Linux.
Adobe Acrobat
You don’t have to rely solely on free and open-source software to perform PDF OCR, either. Adobe offers a PDF OCR tool online for its Acrobat readers. To get started, simply upload your PDF or drag-and-drop it onto the page, then wait for the tool to automatically detect whether it’s made up of image-based pages or contains scanned text.
When you do so, the OCR tool will convert all of the content into text while replicating the original font style to ensure consistency. At the end of the conversion process, the new PDF will contain searchable text that you can easily copy and paste into other documents.
One caveat: You must sign in to your Adobe account in order to download a copy of the new searchable PDF or get a shareable link that you can pass along to others.
According to Adobe, there are 750 million or more monthly users of its Acrobat product. That’s enough people to fill nearly every stadium and arena in the United States.