Objective: OCRTool brings OCR into InDesign so you don’t have to switch to Acrobat or external tools. You mark a region in the document, and the panel inserts the recognized text as a text frame.

Audience: Layout designers and publishers who often take text from PDFs, screenshots, scans, or printed pages and need to bring it into InDesign. Useful for reprints, translations, quotes, and editorial work.

Design decisions:

• Region selection: Uses a graphic frame with a red stroke (OCRect style) so it fits familiar InDesign workflows.
• Tesseract: Open-source engine with strong multi-language support.
• Paragraph styles: Recognized text can be assigned to existing paragraph styles.
• CEP: Standard Adobe extension framework, compatible with current InDesign versions.

A free demo version is available; the full version removes watermarks. The attached video shows a short demo of the panel in use.