Tips, guides & updates

No Readable Text Detected After OCR: Six Real Causes

OCR runs for four minutes and returns nothing. A diagnostic walk through the six causes that actually produce an empty result, and what each one needs.

In-Depth Comparison

Searchable PDF, Word or TXT: Which OCR Download to Pick

OCR gives you three downloads and only two of them include the corrections you typed. What each file actually contains, and how to pick by what you will do next.

In-Depth Comparison

Grayscale, B&W or Color: Picking a Scanned PDF Tone

Tone and intensity do different jobs. What each setting changes, the real skew and contrast numbers behind Light, Medium and Heavy, and how to match an old archive.

Your Scanned-Look PDF Downloaded as a ZIP. Here Is Why

Past forty pages the scan effect delivers a ZIP of part PDFs instead of one file. The reason, how to merge them back correctly, and why you often should not.

Why You Cannot Select Text in a Scanned-Look PDF

Search finds nothing in a scanned-effect PDF because the text was replaced by pixels. What that costs you, how to get it back, and the habit that avoids the problem.

In-Depth Comparison

Fast, Advanced or Compatibility: picking an OCR mode

What the three Advanced OCR recognition modes really change, why the Advanced option is sometimes greyed out, and how your device quietly sets the accuracy ceiling.

The 70% line: which OCR words you actually need to check

OCR confidence scores tell you where the engine hesitated, never where it was confidently wrong. A four-minute checking routine for invoices, statements and certificates.

Extracted PDF text has both columns mashed together

Why a two-column PDF comes out of a text extractor with the columns interleaved line by line, what else the same rule breaks, and the three ways to get the order right.

Find one clause in a 300-page PDF using page markers

A four-minute method for locating a clause in a huge tender document, using the page markers in extracted text - and what a missing marker tells you about the file.