Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a technology that enables you to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital scanner into indexed searchable data.

Imagine you’ve got a paper document – for example, an invoice, PO, or PDF contract your partner sent to you by email. Obviously, a scanner is not enough to make this information available for editing, say in Microsoft Word. All a scanner can do is create an image or a snapshot of the document that is nothing more than a collection of black and white or color.   In order to extract or index data from scanned documents,  images or image-only PDFs, you need an OCR software that would single out letters on the image, put them into words and then – words into sentences, thus enabling you to access and edit the content of the original document.