Most capable word processors are able to export a document to a native pdf that contains text elements and can be searched by text. This will not be the case for a scanner or a pdf writer as it generally does not create a text-searchable pdf file. What it does is just an image of a page contained in a pdf wrapper.

This image-only pdf cannot be exported to text with Adobe Acrobat Reader or other similar software unless optical character recognition (OCR) is applied. Without OCR, you would have to manually re-type a document character by character, word by word, which is enormously time consuming.

OCR reduces such pains as it turns non-searchable printed text into machine-encoded content that is text-searchable. Text Fairy is one of the outstanding apps with OCR capabilities and it works reasonably well.

Take a picture of a printed document and within a few seconds, the app recognizes text in the document. You can then make use of the text, copy it to clipboard or directly export to a pdf file that is text-searchable.

This app is available for Android phones and tablets. It is open source, free, no ads and a very useful tool to keep, definitely.  Read More