There are many ways to use the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool within Foxit PDF Editor but the most common ways include OCR-ing a scanned document or image.
To perform the OCR feature on a scanned document:
Step 1: Go to File > Create > From Scanner > Select Your Scanner > Make Searchable (run OCR)> Scan.
Please note: ***This option appears greyed out because my scanner is not connected to my personal laptop. Once you’ve connected, your scanner, these options will be available to select.
Step 2: Because Make Searchable (run OCR) was selected, you can now search your scanned PDF for keywords using Ctrl + F.
Alternatively, you can perform this same function by going to Convert > From Scanner within Foxit PDF Editor. Here you will be presented with the same window as above and follow the same steps to run the OCR function on your document.
Another common way to use the OCR function within Foxit PDF Editor is on images.
Step 1: Drag and drop a image file (for e.g., .jpg, .tiff, .png, etc ) onto Foxit PDF Editor while opened. PhantomPDF will convert this image file into a PDF document.
Please note**: It is not necessary to open the image file that you would like to convert to PDF. All that is necessary is to go to the folder in which the image file is stored and then drag it over to Foxit PDF Editor.
Step 2: Foxit PDF Editor will then advise “Some pages may contain unrecognized text. You can run text recognition to make it searchable or editable”. or go to
To perform searchable OCR in Foxit Editor 12, follow these steps:
- Open the PDF file that you want to perform OCR on in Foxit Editor 12.
- Click on the "Convert" tab in the top menu bar, and then select "Recognize Text- Current File" from the drop-down menu.
- In the OCR dialog box, select the language of the text in your PDF file. If the language is not listed, select "Custom" and then specify the language in the "OCR Language" field.
- Choose whether you want to perform OCR on the entire document or just a specific page range.
- Select the output format for your OCR text. You can choose between plain text, searchable PDF, or editable text.
- Click on the "Convert" button to start the OCR process. This may take a few minutes depending on the size of your PDF file.
- Once the OCR process is complete, you will be able to search for text in your PDF file using the search function in Foxit Editor 12.
Step 3: Select Recognize Text (circled above) and then you will be presented with this window:
Here you can indicate whether you’d like the OCR engine to run on the Current page/All Pages or a Page range as well as the language you’d like the OCR engine to support and whether you’d like to be able to search the text image or edit the text within the image. After you’ve made your choices, select OK.
By checking Find All suspects tool this enables you to manually go through each text within the image (that has been converted to PDF) to identify whether the characters highlighted is “Not text” or “Accept” . If you'd prefer, Foxit PDF Editor to recognize all text within the image without manually reviewing, leave the Find All Suspects tool unchecked.
