However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching.
Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.įor PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. These products were created by scanning an original printed edition.
