Participant

Question

Acrobat Not Recognizing Text in My PDF

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
March 12, 2020
4 replies
3962 views

I have a PDF (a few hundred pages), made up of scans of old books. The author would like to typeset them anew, as the printing is not all that sharp. It's still very readable, but Acrobat DC doesn't seem to recognize it as text (other than the page numbers, which it converts to text) when I try Edit PDF in my tools. It just sees the pages as big graphics. We can't afford to retype all those pages, and would like to find an OCR which will do this. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong in Acrobat, or I need some third-party software.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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ProlificUser

Participating Frequently

Extract a couple of pages from the PDF. Keep the orginals in the PDF, do not delete them. This is just for testing purposes. Save the extracted pages as a new PDF, say test1.pdf
https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/how-to/extract-pages-from-pdf.html

Then if you have Windows, use the Adobe Print to PDF feature to print the new PDF and save it as test2.pdf
https://helpx.adobe.com/in/acrobat/using/print-to-pdf.html

Then try editing the test2.pdf and see if it works.

If you have a Mac OS, export the test1.pdf to images(jpg) and then use the create tool in Acrobat to create a PDF,s ave it as test2.pdf.

Then try editing the test2.pdf and see if it works.

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Flawless_creation16B8

Participating Frequently

Thanks so much! I exported jpgs from the PDF and then dragged them back into Acrobat, and now they seem to be editable! This is a life-saver. Interesting that it only exports 30 pages, so I guess I'll have to break it up into sections, but that's just a minor inconvenience, unless you have a work-around for that.

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ProlificUser

Participating Frequently

Seems there is a limit on the number of exports it can do. I have never tried to export a lot of pages. But, I am glad that this worked. Breaking it into sections seems like a logical thing to do. I will let you know if I find a better solution.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Waow, such a good surprise!

It is certainly a "new feature" of Acrobat.

So now you must send the file to yourself, then clic the blue button "Track file", and clic "Get shared link".

The developers of Acrobat are right, it is much more practical as well...

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Can you share one or a few samples pages?

(Acrobat : File menu : Share File : Get Link)

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

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Flawless_creation16B8

Participating Frequently

I've gone to Share File, but I don't see a Get Link option. It's asking for an email address.

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Test Screen Name

Legend

If the printing is not sharp it sounds as if the scan was at too low a resolution. That will also ruin your chances of OCR. What resolution did you scan at?

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jmsrbsAuthor

Participant

I'm not sure. The issue could be that the books are old and the print was never crisp to begin with. But it's still very readable, so I'm surprised that it doesn't pick up any of it at all.

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

Scanners offer a wide range of settings; some scanners will even do the OCR themselves. Unhappily, scanner software tries to hide all these details and reduce it to a "scan button". I recommend scanning a test page with many settings and compare. Also compare Acrobat's own OCR settings. You may need other software, or none may be suitable...

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