PDF OCR Scanner
Extract text from scanned PDFs using optical character recognition
Someone scanned a 50-page contract and emailed it as a PDF. You can see the text but you can't select, search, or copy anything — it's just an image of text. You need the actual content searchable and editable, not a digital photograph of paper.
Who it's for: legal teams digitizing scanned contracts and court documents, accountants extracting data from scanned receipts and invoices, archivists converting paper document collections to searchable digital format, offices processing scanned mail and faxed documents, researchers digitizing historical documents and records
Example
"Make this scanned 30-page contract searchable and copyable" → OCR-processed PDF with selectable text layer, 98% character accuracy, searchable keywords, extracted text also saved as a separate Word document for editing
CLAUDE.md Template
New here? 3-minute setup guide → | Already set up? Copy the template below.
npx ccplaybooks add pdf-ocr# PDF OCR Extraction
Extract text from scanned documents and image-based PDFs using OCR technology.
## Overview
This workflow helps you:
- Extract text from scanned documents
- Make image PDFs searchable
- Digitize paper documents
- Process handwritten text (limited)
- Batch process multiple documentsGet new playbooks like this one
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What This Does
Extract text from scanned documents and image-based PDFs using OCR technology.
Quick Start
Step 1: Create a Project Folder
mkdir -p ~/Documents/PdfOcr
Step 2: Download the Template
Click Download above, then:
mv ~/Downloads/CLAUDE.md ~/Documents/PdfOcr/
Step 3: Start Working
cd ~/Documents/PdfOcr
claude
How to Use
Basic OCR
With Options
Output Format
Plain Text Extraction
Limitations
- Cannot guarantee 100% accuracy
- Handwritten text has low accuracy
- Very small text may not extract well
- Decorative fonts are problematic
- Background images reduce quality
- Cannot read text in complex graphics
- Processing time increases with pages