Do you a have a printed document and need to make a digital copy of it? Scanning is a quick option. Or an even quicker one is photographing it with your smartphone. In both cases, what you will get is an image of the text, most likely saved under a raster format, such as PNG, JPEG or TIFF. In fact, the latter is often preferred by scanning and faxing devices due to its good quality rendering of text.
But while being an accessible and flexible format, supporting both lossy and lossless compression, TIFF has one major disadvantage. Texts scanned under this format cannot be edited or searched. This might be a problem if, for example, you have a scanned book and need to look for a certain keyword. Or if you want to translate the scanned document via machine translation. The best solution in such cases is converting to a format that can be edited and searched — PDF.