Optical character recognition, usually abbreviated as OCR, is a technology which can translate the characters on an image file into a text documents that can be easily interpreted by any text processing tool.
OCR-dedicated applications can be used for converting books into text files, to translate office documents into electronic files or to publish text online.
Additionally, OCR tools can also extract images and text, thus enabling users to easily edit the data.
Furthermore, one can also use these utilities to locate a keyword or to distribute their files with greater ease.