Why does making my PDFs searchable compromise their visual quality?

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
August 7, 2016
3 replies
1025 views

I wrote some Internet pages to PDF. This results in non-searchable files (in contrast to saving Word documents to PDF, which maintains the OCR in the PDF).

Once written to PDF, I run OCR on the Internet pages that I saved to make them searchable. This significantly compromises the visual quality of the files. Is there a reason for this or a way to avoid it?

This topic has been closed for replies.

J

jmt111Author

Inspiring

From within Google Chrome, I print the page to PDF using Adobe Acrobat X as the printer.

Actually, I just tried printing this page to PDF and the PDF file that was produced was searchable (i.e., I am able to search for words in the document and Acrobat finds them). When I originally posted, the file that was written to PDF lost its search-ability. I will post back if the issue recurs.

G

gkaiseril

Inspiring

It is well known that "refrying" a PDF through the PDF Printer loses a lot of quality. You should not be doing this.

Refrying PDFs –   the good, the bad and the ugly by Leonard Rosenthal

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

I think we need to talk about terms. There is no OCR when you go from Word to PDF!

OCR is looking at an image (usually but not always a scanned paper page), and using guesswork to figure out where the text is. Once Acrobat has the text it can keep the original image, replace it with the text, or do something smart in between.

Rather than trying to fix the OCR I'd look instead at why you need it. It's an error prone process, intended only when you have nothing but paper to work with. So, how do you make the web page? Do you use graphics for text? And how do you convert the web page to PDF? What version of Acrobat?

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