Use automatic optical character recognition (OCR) software in Acrobat.

Convert scanned documents to PDFs you can edit instantly.

Need to update a paper document? Don’t retype it or bother with tedious OCR steps. Instead, turn it into a PDF you can edit right away using custom fonts that look just like your printout.

Instantly edit any paper document.

Scan any paper document to PDF or open a scanned image. Acrobat will automatically convert image to text and PDF to text, and take care of the optical character recognition tasks so you don’t have to.

Get a custom font that matches your printout.

When Acrobat opens your scan for editing, it automatically generates a custom font. When you add or edit text within the PDF document, it will look just like the type in your original.

Edit text in other applications.

Once your printed document is scanned and converted, it's easy to extract text to cut and paste into another application or export to Microsoft Office to edit as a text file.

Convert scans to PDF for archiving.

When you need to preserve the exact look and feel of documents for legal purposes — and don’t want editing capabilities — save them as smart PDFs that include text you can search and copy.

How-to guide

How to convert scanned PDFs to instantly editable text using automatic OCR software in Acrobat:

Open a PDF file containing a scanned image in Acrobat.
Click on the Edit PDF tool in the right pane. Acrobat automatically applies optical character recognition (OCR) to your document and converts it to a fully editable copy of your PDF.
Click the text element you wish to edit and start typing. New text matches the look of the original fonts in your scanned image.
Choose File > Save As and type a new name for your editable document.