iText pdfOCR
iText pdfOCR offers Optical Character Recognition functionality to convert your scanned documents, PDFs and images into fully ISO-compliant PDF or PDF/A-3u files making it possible to access and process the text they contain.
Every day we receive scanned documents or images containing printed text in huge amounts. But without machine-readable text, the content cannot be edited, searched, indexed or processed.
How it works
Take a look at how easy it is to OCR a list of images and create a PDF file!
Why use iText pdfOCR?
One of the major challenges in document management is dealing with inaccessible data, data which is locked away in non-editable documents. Scanning a document containing printed text does not make it editable or searchable however, you just have a scanned image of the content.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can help to unlock this data. One of the most common use cases for OCR is to produce documents which can be searched, processed, or archived. While some word processing and PDF applications now offer OCR functionality to make PDFs editable, manually doing this for more than a few documents is impractical.
iText pdfOCR provides a way to automate the OCR process, and integrate it into document workflows.
Automate text recognition
- iText pdfOCR enables the automation of text recognition into a document workflow process.
Ideal for long-term archiving
- iText pdfOCR can generate PDF/A-3u compliant files, the accepted standard for long-term archiving and preservation of PDF electronic documents.
- Documents can also be secured with digital signatures, based on the PAdES standard.
Process and transform data using iText
OCR enables you to perform additional processing and data transformation. Some examples for using iText pdfOCR in combination with other iText software:
- Define specific document elements for extraction with iText pdf2Data.
- Securely redact recognized text with iText pdfSweep.
- Use extracted text to populate PDF form fields using iText Core.
- Merge text into HTML templates for iText pdfHTML conversion to PDF.
- Use recognized text with iText DITO and add data binding and conditional formatting to PDF templates.
Core capabilities of pdfOCR
The output can be configured to be text, a PDF consisting of separate layers for the source image data and a layer containing all recognized text, or as a flattened PDF with the layers merged. If you need documents to be suitable for long-term archive storage, then the support for PDF/A-3u output is an added bonus.
Powered by the open source Tesseract 4 engine
- Tesseract 4 is the latest stable release of the popular open source OCR engine
- It uses a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network to improve its speed and accuracy of text recognition.
Simple, yet flexible API
- The API is simple to use, and consistent with common practices for both Java and .NET
- It is also abstracted, to allow support for different OCR engines with little or no effort from users.
Supports multiple input images
- Can process single images, or a list of images at once.
- Accepts BMP, PNM, PNG, JFIF, JPEG or TIFF formats.
Text only extraction option
- iText pdfOCR can recognize text in documents and export it as a text file
- This can be used to populate external databases or with other tools.
Resources
Here you will find the necessary resources to install and use pdfOCR.