OCR Tools: Coping with PDF Files
Archived article. Written for freelance translators in 2015; some details may be out of date.
As a medical translator, I work with a LOT of PDF files. I probably use my OCR tool up to 10 times per day and I’m fairly certain that at this point, I couldn’t work without it. However, it took some time before I figured out exactly how to get the most out of it and I’m certain that I haven’t even scratched the surface. In case you are not familiar with OCR, it stands for “Optical Character Recognition” and is basically used to turn “dead” (not editable) documents of all kinds (including pictures and PDFs) into editable Word documents preserving the formatting of the original. This sometimes works better in theory than in practice since a bad fax can ruin the OCR tool’s ability to properly recreate formatting.
