What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, which is a tool for making files more accessible. It processes typed text in images like scanned documents and PDFs, and creates an editable, searchable, and machine-readable script of that text in the file. Adobe’s website says the following about OCR “It makes static content adjustable and eliminates the need for data to be entered manually.” https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/guides/what-is-ocr.html

To use OCR, it’s important to make sure that the file you want to run OCR on is saved as a PDF and that the text is typed, rather than handwritten. Unfortunately, OCR isn’t designed to recognize handwriting, and can’t produce a copy of handwritten text.