OCR built into Preview?

[Bengt77]

Just yet I was searching for articles on math education for young children, when I found this article. An interesting read, but that's not the point of my post. Seeing clearly that the PDF was scanned, I foolishly attempted a search for some text. And right then I was amazed. The text was found! Well, I wasn't amazed because that specific string of text was found, but more because of the fact that text was found, period. How is that even possible? If you zoom in, you can clearly see the jiggies around the letter's edges, making it clear that the whole document was scanned.

So my question is: is there OCR built into Preview? How else would this be possible?

EDIT: It doesn't work with this scanned PDF document, though. So what is the deal here?

 

[sammich]

The person who uploaded that PDF used OCR on that scanned page. The information is embedded in the pdf. Adobe can do that for you.

What would've been OCR is if that article were a image file (jpeg, png, tiff etc) and you could select text in that image.

 

[Bengt77]

Ah, okay. That explains. Would have been really cool if OCR actually was built into Preview, though.