Apply OCR to PDF articles in Knowledge Base

[Sarvesh Katnesh]

Hello,

I have thousands of knowledge articles out of which more than 500 are pdf articles, but if I search any word from the pdf it is not searchable due to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) issues. It is very difficult to find pdf article from all and convert it one by one.

Is there any way to find and apply OCR to all those pdf articles within ServiceNow itself?

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

Hi, are those PDFs scans (images) or "properly" formatted PDFs? If it's the latter, you should be able to search through them like other attachments, by enabling indexing:

https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/sandiego-platform-administration/page/administer/search-adm...

Have you tried the above first?

Regarding OCR, there is a component included in the Robotic Process Automation Hub (RPA Hub) in ServiceNow, or you can leverage external components like Adobe or Azure Computer Vision. None of those are free I believe, just to be aware.

[Sarvesh Katnesh]

Hi,

Yes, PDF's are properly formatted and I also enabled indexing, but still PDF's are not searchable.

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

Not sure if you use Zing search or the AI search but in any case, it should look through attachments as well, if those are indexed. I believe the configuration looks different though.

Please make sure first to review the search configuration you have. Also note that after enabling indexing, you need to run the indexing on all affected tables. This may take quite some time.