What is OCR? How to Extract Editable Text from Scanned PDFs
By Hoozl AI Research • Published on 2026-08-10 • 6 min read
When you scan a physical sheet of paper with a printer or smartphone camera, the resulting PDF is essentially a flat digital photograph. You cannot highlight text, copy sentences, or search for keywords. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solves this problem by using artificial intelligence to recognize letter shapes and convert images into digital text.
How AI Optical Character Recognition Works
Hoozl's AI OCR engine scans document images line-by-line, identifying font patterns, handwriting symbols, and structural blocks across 50+ languages.
- Converts non-searchable PDFs into searchable PDF/A documents
- Extracts raw text into TXT, Word, or Markdown format
- Supports English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Arabic, and more
- High accuracy even on low-resolution mobile scans