Live Text on PDF files

QHow to use Live Text on a PDF document?

A Monterey’s Live Text converts words or letters found in images to text which you can then paste into documents or look up. It only works on images, such as JPEG or PNG files, on which it performs advanced optical character recognition (OCR).

Although PDF documents using scans retain the original images, they’re stored as special objects within the file, not as readily accessible images like photographs. That stops Live Text from performing OCR on them.

Normally, if scanned images in PDF have already undergone OCR to create PDF text, it’s better to stay with that text. If you want to try Live Text to see if it’s any better, you’ll have to export each page, or make screenshots of them, and use those images with Live Text.

To use Live Text’s advanced OCR, first export a high quality image of each page, such as 300dpi PNG. Open that image in Preview and you can select its recognised text, then copy and paste it into any text editor.