DZone

Without the ability to copy, paste, or edit within a PDF document, it can be a frustrating task to manually transcribe a PDF to text. Fortunately for us, we have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to help us out. We have discussed this a bit in previous articles, but to clarify, optical character recognition or optical character reader is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine-encoded text. 

OCR is most popular as a form of data entry for printed paper data records, but it is also frequently used to digitize printed texts so that they can be edited, stored compactly, or displayed online. This technology has been refined and trained to recognize patterns, and now with the additional assistance of AI, can provide a high degree of accuracy with little effort. 

Source: DZone