What is OCR and how does it actually work?

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the technology that converts images of text — photos, scans, PDFs — into machine-readable characters you can search, copy, and edit.

Classic OCR works in stages: it cleans up the image, detects where text lives, segments it into lines and characters, then classifies each shape into a character. Modern engines like FlowOCR add layout understanding and language models on top, so results respect structure like tables and columns.

The result is that a scanned invoice doesn't just become a wall of text — it becomes structured fields you can pipe directly into your systems.