A PDF produced by a scanner may simply be a sequence of images. You can read it on screen, but searching for a name, selecting a sentence or reusing its text becomes difficult. OCR adds a text layer, and preparing the scan first avoids processing unnecessary material.
The ready-made template cleans the scan and then applies OCR to produce a searchable PDF.
Open this ready-to-use Pipeline
Why clean before OCR?
A scanned bundle may contain blank pages, intermediate scans or visual characteristics that are not useful in the final document. Removing or normalizing them before recognition reduces wasted work and makes the workflow more consistent.
The Pipeline keeps the operations in the right order so OCR runs on the prepared document rather than on a file you still need to clean afterwards.
What OCR does
Optical character recognition analyses page images to identify characters and create usable text. The PDF can then become searchable while retaining the appearance of the scan.
OCR is not infallible. Accuracy depends on resolution, sharpness, orientation, contrast, language and layout complexity.
When this workflow helps
It works well for scanned letters, administrative archives, paper contracts, invoices and files where you need to find a word or reference quickly. It does not automatically turn a complex layout into structured data: a recognized table is not the same thing as a spreadsheet.