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Known Participant
January 19, 2016
Question

How do I OCR a page that already has searchable text?

  • January 19, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 1839 views

The wonders with Adobe never cease.  Apparently, it won't OCR a page even if one little word on the page is already searchable.  Other programs which utilize pdfs don't have this issue.  Rather, I constantly marvel at how inferior Adobe is to handling its pdf creations.  Does anyone know a way to make Acrobat OCR the rest of the page?

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2 replies

Bernd Alheit
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 20, 2016

Save the page as TIFF file. Create a PDF from the TIFF file. Perform OCR on the new PDF.

Known Participant
January 20, 2016

Hi.  Exporting it to TIFF and back to PDF dramatically worsens the quality.  Is there a way instead, perhaps, to flatten the page so that Adobe no longer considers it rendered text?

This is pathetic of Adobe.

Bernd Alheit
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 20, 2016

‌Flatten it with save as TIFF.

Known Participant
January 19, 2016

The error i get is:

"Acrobat could not perform recognition (OCR) on this page because:

This page contains renderable text."

It must just be pure genius of Adobe I don't understand to make things so difficult.