OCR: webPDF converts graphics into editable documents

Let OCR integrate faxes into your workflow

OCR stands for optical character recognition and is a technology that allows PDF documents to be converted into text documents that can be searched and edited. Even in the digital age, faxes have not lost all their importance and are still used widely in a number of areas. The problem: Once scanned, these documents are available as either graphics files or as PDFs that contain only reproduced images and no text content, which means they cannot be integrated into your workflows. The solution is to use OCR to convert these graphics documents into editable PDF documents which allow them to be searched for specific terms and thus capable of being integrated into your company’s workflows. webPDF provides the means of creating PDF documents from digitally recorded faxes that not only contain the fax image, but the text content as well.

The daily routine of working with faxes can be a tiresome task. Even when a fax is available in digital form as a PDF – nowadays such conversions are usually done automatically or by scanning the document – the content often has to be inputted manually into another document. This takes a lot of time because these are graphics documents and are not searchable. These kinds of PDF documents are mostly “wrappers” for the graphics and serve as mere vehicles for the scanned documents. This makes it difficult and time consuming if, for instance, you need to find and document an order or customer number in one or many such files as these.

In order to make such PDF documents searchable again so that you can find specific terms, you will have to use OCR to convert them into the kind of PDF documents that not only contain the image of the fax, but also their content in text form. In this way, text can be marked and copied in the usual way, thus allowing faxes to be integrated into your workflows and automatically administered and managed. webPDF offers the additional option of not creating an entirely new PDF document during the OCR process, but instead directly accessing the text content – e.g. as an XML document – and specifically further processing it. Optical character recognition can also be used on graphics formats, such as TIFF, JPEG and PNG. Here is yet another outstanding way for businesses to optimize their processes and integrate faxes into their administrative workflows.