Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The ability to edit scanned documents is essential in today’s digital age. No longer do you have to waste time (and paper) by printing, editing and re-scanning documents every time you need to make a minor edit. Nitro’s advanced OCR technology enables effortless and efficient editing of scanned documents.

The OCR tool allows users to convert scanned documents and images into searchable and editable text.

Automatic OCR

  1. Open a scanned PDF in Nitro PDF Pro.
  2. An alert box opens with the message:
    “This document appears to be scanned. Would you like to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on it? OCR will allow you to select the text.”
  3. You have three options:

Cancel: No OCR will be performed.

OCR Page: OCR will be performed on the current page.

OCR Document: If your document has multiple pages, OCR will be performed on all of the pages.

 

Manual OCR

In some cases, Nitro PDF Pro may not recognize a scanned document. Under the Edit menu, OCR Page will be grayed out and unavailable to select.

  1. Hold down the Command and Option keys together.
  2. Choose Edit > OCR Page from the menu.

Additional resources:

Want to know more? Check out this training guide and video for further information.

How to utilize the OCR tool in a PDF »
OCR