PDF
PDF OCR
Makes scanned PDFs searchable: each page is read with English text recognition and the words are laid over the page as invisible text, so it looks the same but can be searched, selected and extracted. The text also comes out in an OCR Text column.
When to use it
Use it for scanned invoices, letters and forms whose text cannot be selected, before PDF Extract Text, a search, or an archive that must be searchable.
In a pipeline
PDF File InputPDF OCRPDF Extract Text
Settings
| Setting | Type | Required | Default or hint |
|---|---|---|---|
| PDF path column | select | — | Default: the PDF from the node before |
| Pages | text | — | All pages, or e.g. 1-3, 5 |
| Resolution (DPI) | number | — | 300 |
| Skip pages that already have text | checkbox | — | true |
Example
A searchable scanned invoice
- Resolution (DPI)=300
| Pages Read | Confidence | OCR Text | PDF Output Path |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 91 | Invoice 1042 … Total 860.00 | …/invoice_ocr.pdf |
Worth knowing
- English only. Recognition runs on the FlowDoo server — nothing is sent anywhere.
- About a second per page at 300 DPI; a preview reads the first 2 pages of each PDF.
- Pages that already contain text are skipped (untick Skip pages that already have text to read them anyway).
- Confidence is Tesseract's average, 0–100; below about 70 the scan is usually too faint or skewed — try 400 DPI.