Does converting HEIC to PDF give me editable text?
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Yes, when OCR is enabled — the image is analysed, characters are recognised and written into the PDF as real text you can select, search and edit. With OCR off, the HEIC is simply placed into the document as a picture.
How accurate is the text recognition?
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On a clean, straight, high-resolution scan of printed text, accuracy is typically well above 98%. It falls off with low resolution, skew, shadows, coloured or textured backgrounds, unusual fonts and handwriting — handwriting in particular should be treated as unreliable.
How do I get the best OCR result from my HEIC?
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Scan or photograph at 300 DPI or better, keep the page flat and square to the camera, light it evenly, and avoid heavy compression. Because this format is read and written by the same streaming pipeline as everything else we support, a source saved at low quality has compression artefacts around every letter, and the recogniser reads those as part of the glyph.
Which languages can be recognised?
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All the major Latin-script languages plus Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Tell the converter which language to expect — the recogniser uses a language model, and the right one measurably improves accuracy on ambiguous characters.
Is the page layout preserved?
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Reading order, paragraph breaks and simple columns are reconstructed. Complex magazine layouts, sidebars, footnotes and text wrapped around images will be linearised — the words are all there, but the visual arrangement is simplified.
Are tables in the image recognised as tables?
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Ruled tables with visible gridlines are usually reconstructed as real PDF tables. Tables aligned only with whitespace are often read as plain text columns, because there is no visual boundary for the layout analyser to detect.
Can I convert several HEIC pages into one document?
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Yes — upload the pages in order and they become sequential pages or sections of a single PDF. Name the files so they sort correctly, since filename order is what determines page order.
What if I only want the picture in the document, not the text?
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Turn OCR off. The HEIC is then embedded as an image, sized to the page, and the PDF contains a picture rather than characters. That is the right choice for photographs, diagrams and artwork.
Will the image quality drop inside the PDF?
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The embedded picture is inserted at its original resolution and only scaled for display. Because PDF fixes the page: fonts, vectors, raster images and text coordinates are frozen so every reader sees identical layout, the document may recompress on save depending on the application settings, which is why a very large photo can look slightly softer after a round trip.
Can I edit the result afterwards?
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Yes — the output is a normal PDF that opens in any compatible editor. That is generally the reason for the conversion: turning a flat image of a page into something you can correct, restructure and reuse.
Should I proofread the OCR output?
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Always, for anything that matters. Recognition errors cluster on digits, punctuation and proper nouns — exactly the content where a mistake does the most damage. Treat OCR as a very fast first draft, not as a finished transcript.
Is my HEIC private during conversion?
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Yes — uploads are processed in isolated workers and deleted within minutes. Scanned documents, which often contain personal data, are never stored, reviewed or used for training. See /privacy/.
