I have seen some OCR software that can kind of translate very well-written hand-printed text, but even at that, it does not come close to getting every character correct and you end up with a document that needs tons of editing to make it look correct. Our handwriting, especially cursive writing is just too different for OCR technology to read and convert. The short answer, at least for PDF formatted files is no. This is a great question and one that is a big topic with those trying to convert paper documents to digital ones. Can This Process Work For a Hand-Written Document? The preview application really does have some great tools that can allow you to make many of the changes you might need. You can even redact text within the PDF if there are things in there you don’t want others to see. You can add text, shapes, and highlighting. You can’t edit the existing text, but you can add things to the document. When using it with a PDF file, you can make some edits right in the Preview tool. You may notice some of the powerful features that Preview actually has. The Power of Previewĭuring this process, you will use Mac’s Preview tool. Once the text is in the PDF file, PDF gives us the ability to select and copy text from it, which in turn allows us to paste the copied text into another text editor. If the image is unclear or distorted due to wrinkled or damaged paper, it may not interpret all of the characters correctly.īecause of this, it is good to make sure you go back and verify the entire text for accuracy. OCR is not perfect and it often depends on the quality of the original image file. Once detected, OCR takes the text images and converts them to real characters in the PDF file. When you convert your image file or your scanning software saves the image as a PDF file, the PDF format uses OCR to detect any text that may be contained on the image.

It may seem like magic and it kind of is a little bit of software magic called OCR or Optical Character Recognition.

Now that you have seen or even completed this process, you may be wondering how a scanned image file can become editable text. How Does a Scanned Image File Become Text? With most text editors you can even save it as a PDF file again if you want. You can now print, save, email, make more edits, or do whatever you want to the document. Step 7: Make your edits to the document wherever needed. For our example above you would need to center the Title. Step 6: You may need to do some slight editing to make the document look the same.

How to edit a document on mac