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What is Optical Character Recognition?

OCR

Technology that converts visual texts into digital text that can be edited by a computer.

Overview

This technology recognizes text on scanned documents or photos and converts them into editable text files. It acts as a bridge that converts the text on a piece of paper that you see with your eyes into digital characters that the computer can understand. Nowadays, it is frequently used in invoice scanning or digitizing old documents.

Analogy: It is like magic glasses that can take a photo of a book and copy and paste the text in that photo into a Word file.

How it works

The system first scans the image and analyzes the letter shapes. It then matches these shapes with characters in its database. In the final stage, it creates meaningful texts by combining these characters.

Where it is used

It is used to make scanned PDF documents editable, automatically read ID card information, and digitize handwritten notes.

Commonly confused with

Unlike browsers that just save the image as is, it converts the content into text.

Frequently asked questions

Can he read handwriting?

Yes, advanced systems can now digitize handwriting with high accuracy.

Does it work in all languages?

Most systems support common languages, but special scripts may require additional training.

Related terms

Related tools

This explanation was written in plain language for TreScout and machine-translated from the Turkish original · the Turkish version prevails. If something looks wrong or missing, write to hello@trescout.com. Read in Turkish →