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jnelson39
Participant
August 31, 2016
Answered

Covert pdf to OCR Fast

Our office receives documents via email that usually aren't searchable and our staff spends a lot of time using Adobes text recognition.  Is there software that can convert existing pdfs into a searchable document quickly? 

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gkaiserilCorrect answer
Inspiring
August 31, 2016

Acrobat is not designed for just OCR processing. You may want to look at 3rd party products that are specifically designed for OCR processing. Many of these be server based. Adobe offers a LiveCycle server that can perform OCRing. There also maybe hardware products that are dedicated to the OCR process.

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9 replies

charliem84327048
Participant
March 23, 2017

Please forgive me for coming late to the party.  Back when I was using Adobe Acrobat X or XI, I'm pretty sure that if I wanted to OCR a document, it was pretty easy.  With Acrobat DC Standard, for some reason, I no longer had that ability. As such, I've just upgraded to Acroboat DC Pro (I think it's called Pro) to have the OCR capability.  I couldn't find an easy way to do the OCR.  E.g., in Acrobat X or XI if you word searched it would tell you that it hand't been OCR'd and did you want it to OCR, and you clicked yes.  Here, I went to the edit tool and ended up having to click on each page of the document that I wanted to be OCR'd.  Is there an easier way? 

I'll appreciate any help from anyone on this. 

Thank you,

CM

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    peterb82378328
    peterb82378328
    Participant
    May 5, 2017

    I completely agree with you.  I just purchased Acrobat DC Pro, and, unlike with earlier versions of Acrobat, it appears that documents cannot be easily converted to searchable PDFs.  For example, when printing a webpage to Adobe PDF, in the past, the PDF file created could be set to be automatically searchable, with Acrobat DC Pro, this does not seem possible???

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    Test Screen Name
    Legend
    May 6, 2017

    Yes DC Pro includes OCR ('text recognition'). The tools can be baffling, use search in Tools.

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    jnelson39Author
    Participant
    August 31, 2016

    I'm asking about Adobe products.  As far as fast, more than one page a second would be nice.  We have some documents that take several minutes to convert and we can have several of those to do at once.

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    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    August 31, 2016

    Sorry, I misunderstood. I'm only aware of Acrobat, but maybe there's some kind of server application from the LiveCycle family that can do it more efficiently...

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    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    August 31, 2016

    One alternative I can suggest (not by Adobe) is ABBYY FineReader.

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    try67
    Community Expert
    try67Community Expert
    Community Expert
    August 31, 2016

    Depends how you define "quickly"... At any rate, this is an Adobe forum so it's not really the place to discuss competing products.

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