A scanned page or a photo of a document is just an image — you can't select or search the text. OCR (optical character recognition) reads the letters and turns them into real text.
What OCR can do
Pull a quote from a textbook photo, digitize a printed receipt, make an old scanned contract searchable, or copy text from a screenshot.
Steps
- For PDFs, open PDF OCR; for images, open Image to Text.
- Upload your file.
- Run the recognition and copy or download the text.
Getting accurate results
Clear, straight, well-lit scans work best. Skewed or blurry images reduce accuracy, so straighten and crop before running OCR.