Understanding OCR Technology
When you scan a paper document using a flatbed scanner or smartphone camera, the output is essentially a high-resolution bitmap photograph encased in a PDF container. The text cannot be searched, copied, or indexed.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) analyzes visual pixel patterns, identifies letter shapes across multilingual glyph libraries, and overlays invisible text layers matching the exact bounding boxes of the original document scan.
Running OCR Entirely in the Browser
Avatar PDF uses WebAssembly ports of modern neural OCR pipelines to process scanned documents locally on your GPU/CPU without transmitting sensitive medical, legal, or financial papers to cloud APIs.