Skip to main content
Participant
January 30, 2024
Question

Acrobat keeps trying to "fix" my artwork

  • January 30, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 966 views

Hi everyone, I've been having this issue for a few months now and it's having a negative affect both my productivity and my mental state. I deal with a lot of scans of hand-drawn artwork. Sometimes it's just images, sometimes images and text. My problem is that whenever I open a scan in Acrobat, and then click "organize pages" it attempts to "fix" the scan by rotating/skewing it, and often it also attempts to recognize the text and make it editable. The artists are not asking my to fix their artwork, as they submit it how they want it. I am not asking Acrobat to try to fix anything so I don't know why it's doing this. This is one of the most frustrating features of Acrobat I've ever dealt with in 20+ years of using it. I've tried may different ways to disable it, but I guess I'm just not able to find the correct setting. Any help is greatly appreciated. I'm using Acrobat Pro version 2023.008.20470.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

gary_sc
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 30, 2024

Hi, @Christopher062481, the solution is to stop trying to "fix" things in Acrobat. Despite the fact that you can make small edits in text or minor adjustments to the placement of images in Acrobat, it's best to consider an Acrobat document as a printed page. 

 

I'm not seeing one of the pages in question. Have you tried to layout that page as you want it (digitally) printed?

 

Yes, it is true that Acrobat cannot distinguish between what you do not want OCRed versus what you do want OCRed. But maybe there are ways around this to some degree but right now we are flying blind.

 

Can you please share one of the documents? Perhaps a screenshot? Maybe I, or someone else, can provide some suggestions as to how to deal with this to limit your frustration.

Participant
January 30, 2024

Hi @gary_sc,

Thanks for your reply to my post. I am actually not attempting to fix or edit these PDF files in any way. I have InDesign for that. As I said, the artwork is submitted just as the artist intends, and just as I want them to print. I am simply combining a few PDF files in order to RIP to my Fiery to print a booklet. I do not see the necessity to import into InDesign to compose a book when this is something I was able to achieve quickly in Acrobat this time last year. That would add an unnecesary step to my workflow. The fact that Acrobat now takes over and starts messing with my pages on it's own is the issue I am trying to overcome. I've attached a couple of screenshots to illustrate the issue (before and after). Thanks again for your reply, I really appreciate it!

gary_sc
Community Expert
Community Expert
January 30, 2024

Hi, @Christopher062481, interesting.

 

So, the entire page content is just the image, which is flipping 180°. Let's try the following:

 

I'm assuming you're using the new UI, but if you're using the old one, you should be able to hack to this, it's similar to the previous view (once you get there).

 

In the Scan and OCR Tools, look for Enhance scanned file and after opening that, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner:

In the middle of the next window, you'll see "Filters," click on Edit

 Now, go into the dropdown for Deskew, and select " OFF."

Normally, Deskew is used when you've scanned a hard copy book and the scan is slightly skewed. This will straighten the page (which also helps the OCR quality), but in your case, you do not want any deskewing or any OCR. This, by itself, will not stop the OCR but it should stop the rotation.

 

BTW, IF you are preparing the body of the document in ID, why are you running OCR on the document? IF you click on Edit in Acrobat, it will OCR the page so that it knows where and what the text is and identify text from images, but if you stop editing, you will not get the OCR. Do you really NEED to edit your documents after you've exported them from ID? I'm not sure I understand your work steps here.