Key Takeaways:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n While PDFs are commonplace, there is more than one type of PDF. Part of the reason PDFs are so useful is that they can include text, images, and a combination of the two. When a document scanner processes a piece of physical paperwork, it essentially takes a picture of the document to convert to a PDF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This picture of the document is useful because you can store and access it digitally, but you can\u2019t index or edit it the way you could a text document.<\/p>\n\n\n\n OCR, or Optical Character Recognition<\/a>, is software that \u201creads\u201d images of text and converts them into machine-readable digital text. This allows you to edit, sort, and convert PDFs to other file formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scan to PDF software that doesn\u2019t include OCR technology can potentially create additional work for you and your users because it only saves images of text instead of the text itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without the right scan to PDF software, adding additional pages to a PDF document is a tedious, time-consuming process. With the wrong software, the only way to append pages to PDFs is to manually scan and insert pages one at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only is this process frustrating and wasteful, but it is also prone to human error as adding an incorrect page, adding pages out of order, or skipping a page depends completely on a human user adding pages one at a time. Good PDF scanning software should allow users to append additional pages to a PDF from the source itself, rather than requiring an additional process to add pages after the fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Businesses use PDFs because of their versatility and compatibility, but frequently, business users treat PDFs as if they cannot change them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You don\u2019t have to choose between functionality and flexibility with the right scan to PDF software. Your PDF scanning software should allow you to edit PDFs, whether text-or-image-based. FileCenter<\/a> allows users to add text fields, highlight existing text, and even edit the text using OCR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PDF scanning software that doesn\u2019t include PDF editing capabilities is shortsighted because the PDFs you scan won\u2019t always be infallible or future-proof. It\u2019s important to be able to make changes to your PDFs at any point in your documentation process so that you can modify your PDFs to suit your business needs, correct mistakes, and make your documents more flexible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PDFs are versatile and commonplace, but they can\u2019t do everything. When you need to use your documents for presentations, word processing, or worksheets, you need the ability to convert your PDFs into other file formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Converting PDFs into other file formats like Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint is an effective way to boost the value you get from your documents. Simple PDF scanning software isn\u2019t capable of these advanced conversions, as it simply stores your PDFs as images of text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n File conversion is one of the essential features you should expect in your business\u2019s scan to PDF software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
OCR for PDF Scanning Software<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"OCR](\"https:\/\/www.filecenter.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Image-11-1024x709.jpg\")
<\/a>Appending Pages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
PDF Editing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.filecenter.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Image-21-1024x514.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\nFile Conversion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n