OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It’s a technology used to convert printed or handwritten text from documents or scanned images and pages into editable and searchable digital text. This makes it easier to manipulate and share the text, and also makes documents more accessible to screen readers to help the visually impaired.

Absolutely. The first thing to do is make sure you have a searchable, selectable PDF document. If your PDF text isn’t readable, that’s where the OCR technology comes in. After that, you can easily convert your searchable PDF to Microsoft Word for free with our online PDF to Word Converter.

The Smallpdf OCR online tool can make scanned paper documents readable in most languages. Even better than that, though, you can automatically translate searchable PDF documents into nearly any other language. This makes it easier for you to read in your native language, and it lets you automatically convert PDFs into your audiences’ languages, too.

Yes! All of our online PDF tools are free to use, though some limits apply. So you can run your PDFs through OCR, reduce document file sizes, convert between PDF and other file types like MS Office files, JPG, PNG, and GIF—and so much more. For OCR, just drop your docs into the box at the top of this page. Or check out our other free tools in the menu above.