Read the text inside a scan or a photograph of a document and add an invisible layer so you can search it, copy it and select it.
A scan is a picture of words. OCR recognises the shapes, writes the characters it found into the file as an invisible layer positioned over the image, and leaves the picture untouched — so the page still looks exactly as it was, but the text can now be searched with Ctrl+F, copied into a document, or indexed by a search engine.
Recognition depends on the input: 200-300 dpi is the sweet spot. A skewed page, a photograph taken at an angle, or a fax with speckles will produce more mistakes. Straighten and crop first if the result comes out garbled.
It does not understand the document. Tables come out as lines of text, columns can interleave, and a signature is a picture, not words. Treat the recognised text as a draft to check, especially for numbers and names.
The engine recognises Latin script and common punctuation; results are best on English and European languages.
Yes. The searchable layer is added on top; the page still looks the same.
Yes — choose the text output when you run the tool.