The built-in OCR engine of Google Search provides a great utility for converting scanned PDFs into text by just putting all of your scanned PDF images onto a public website and wait for Google spiders to convert them into editable digital text.
Nevertheless there are two drawbacks associated with this. The PDF conversion process is very time consuming, you need access to a public web server where you can upload the PDF images so that Google bots can find them.
If you do not have the patience to wait for a long time and require performing instant OCR without downloading any of the software tools, you must try OCR Terminal – which is an online Optical Character Recognition service where you can upload scanned images, multi-page PDF documents or even screenshots and convert them into searchable text documents.
The conversion results are decently quite accurate and it also restores the document formatting and layout. You can also download the extracted text as RTF or a Word Document. The output is also available as a PDF image though I didn’t find that option very useful.
OCR Terminal is available for but there is a constraint that you are allowed to convert up to 30 scanned pages in a day and it allows for text extraction only from documents that are in English. They are also in the process of developing a desktop client that will allow users to convert scanned PDFs or TIFF images and get them back as formatted Word files without the web browser.
Note: The OCR Terminal service can also help you to extract text from newspaper clippings or images of whiteboards that you may have captured with the help of the camera that is available on your phone.
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