Why your scanned PDFs need OCR before anything else
OCR is the prerequisite for almost every other operation on a scanned PDF.
A scanned PDF is an image of pages, not text. Almost every other operation in a PDF tool suite — Compare, Translate, Summarize, Chat, Search, Edit, Extract — needs text to work on. If your input has no text layer, every downstream tool either fails or returns garbage.
How to know if your PDF needs OCR
Open the PDF and try to copy a sentence. If it copies as text, you have a text layer. If you can't select anything, the file is image-only and needs OCR before anything else.
Order matters: OCR first
Run OCR before splitting (splitting destroys cross-page text continuity). Before compressing (compression softens text edges and hurts OCR). Before translating (the translator has nothing to read without text).
Cost and limits
First 20 pages free per document. After that, 2 credits per page. The credit cost is negligible compared to the time saved on every downstream operation.
Posts authored collectively by the pdfcraft ai team — release notes, infrastructure updates, and editorial content where no single author is the right attribution. Read more →